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W H AT WA S T R A G E D Y ?
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What Was Tragedy?

Theory and the Early Modern Canon

B L A I R H OX B Y

1
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3
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Acknowledgments

Among many current and former colleagues who have shown a friendly interest in
this research, I wish to single out Susan Braund, Leslie Brisman, Adrian Daub,
Harry Elam, Denise Gigante, Stephen Hinton, Gavin Jones, Lawrence Manley,
Patricia Parker, Annabel Patterson, Lee Patterson, Claude Rawson, Joe Roach,
John Rogers, Blakey Vermeule, Sandy Welch and Ruth Yeazell. Others who have
answered queries, helped to construe difficult passages, secured research materials
for me, or sent on references include Jan Bloemendal, Dan Edelstein, Roland
Greene, Heather Hadlock, Robert Harrison, Leon Hopper, S. J., Eva Jenke, ­Geraldine
Klohs, Franco Moretti, John Mustain, Jane Newman, Inga Pierson, David Quint,
and Stuart Snydman. Artemis Brod, Nolan Epstein, Sarah Janda, and Erik Johnson
provided valuable research assistance. I have benefitted from the collections of
many libraries, but I’m particularly grateful for the assistance of librarians at the
Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra ­National de
Paris; the Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Houghton Library, Harvard Uni-
versity; Special Collections, Stanford University; the Theatre Museum of Sweden;
and the Woodstock Theological Library, Georgetown University. Audiences at the
Harvard Humanities Center, the University of Chicago, the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton, and the Stanford Humanities Center asked provocative ques-
tions about this work. Hall Bjornstad, Stephen Orgel, and Ellen Rosand read and
commented on individual chapters in an earlier form. John Bender, Herbert Lin-
denberger, David Quint, David Riggs, and the anonymous readers for the Press
made valuable suggestions on the entire manuscript. Tasha Eccles and Anna Lordan
proof read it. And my wife Caroline not only displayed unshakeable grace during
its gestation, she contributed her own formidable r­esearch skills in the Archives
nationales de France during a supposed “vacation.”
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Contents
List of Figures ix

I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE TRAGIC AND

THE POETICS OF TRAGEDY
1. Our Tragic Culture3
The Early Modern Conception of Tragedy 8
The Philosophy of the Tragic 14
Literary Form, the Philosophy of History, and the Canon 19
Tragedy Born Anew from the Spirit of Music? 26
Decadence and Primitivism 34
The Post-Structural Assault on Tragic Freedom 37
Reassessing the Legacy of Idealism 40
Approaching the World We Have Lost 54

2. An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy57

Definitions58
The Objects of Tragic Imitation 69
Fables72
Manners75
Sentiments79
Diction84
The Player’s Passions 85
Spectacle92
The Chorus 99
Tragic Pleasure 102

I I . T H E WO R L D W E H AV E LO S T
3. Simple Pathetic Tragedy111
Classical Exemplars 112
Recovery and Invention: Trissino’s Sofonisba (1515) 122
A Theoretical Interlude 126
Racine’s Bérénice (1670) 130
Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) 137
Simplicity and Reformation 146
Gluck’s Alceste (1779) 148
La Harpe’s Philoctète (1781) 152
From Pathos to Moral Freedom 156
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viii Contents

4. Operatic Discoveries: The Complex Tragedy with a Happy Ending162

Did Tragic Heroes Sing? 167
Euripides and the Operatic Repertoire 176
The Euripidean Tragedy of Anticipated Woe 179
Idomeneo and the Tragedy of Averted Sacrifice 187

5. Counter-Reformation Tragedy: The Laurel and the Cypress200

Tragedy as Spiritual Exercise 205
Jesuit Defenses of Counter-Reformation Tragedy 240
Enlightened Critiques and Idealist Defenses 246
Final Reckonings 250
Appendix to Chapter 5: Excerpts from Stefonio’s Crispus253

6. History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design: Where Shakespeare

and Dryden Part Company258
Antony and Cleopatra as a Great Occurrence 261
The Art of Portraiture 264
Sublimity Raised from the Very Elements of Littleness 269
Dryden’s Artificial Order 272
Portraiture and History Painting 274
Tides that Swell and Retire to Seas 278
Language283
The World Well Lost 286
Tragedy and History 289

Bibliography295
Index 355
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List of Figures
1.1. Orgies Mysteries Theater (Das Orgien Mysterien Theater),
6-Day Play (6‑Tage Spiel ) Prinzendorf, 1998. 36
1.2. Agostino Carracci’s engraving of Bernardo Buontalenti’s design
for the Third Intermedio of 1589. Florence, Italy. 53
2.1. Sebastiano Serlio, tragic scene from Five Books of Architecture
(De architectvra libri qvinqve, quibus cuncta ferè architectonicae
facultatis mysteria doctè, perspicuè). Venice, 1569. 60
2.2. Sebastiano Serlio, comic scene from Five Books of Architecture
(De architectvra libri qvinqve, quibus cuncta ferè architectonicae
facultatis mysteria doctè, perspicuè). Venice, 1569. 61
2.3. Thomas Walkington, frontispiece of The Opticke Glasse of Humors
[1607]. c. 1631? 77
2.4. A lesson from James Burgh, The Art of Speaking [1761], 7th edn. of 1787. 87
2.5. Charles Le Brun, A study of wonder and admiration (1660–61).
Preparatory drawing for The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander,
or the Tent of Darius. Musée du Louvre. 88
2.6a. Charles Le Brun, Joy (La joie) from On the Expression of the Passions
(Conference sur l’expression des passions).90
2.6b. Ecstasy (Extasis), a detail from D. Fermin Eduardo Zeglirscosac,
Essay on the origin and nature of the passions (Ensayo sobre el origen y
naturaleza de las pasiones). Madrid, 1800. 91
2.7a. Charles Le Brun, Sadness (La tristesse) from On the Expression
of the Passions (Conference sur l’expression des passions).92
2.7b. Sadness (Tristeza), a detail from Zeglirscosac, Essay on the origin and
nature of the passions (Ensayo sobre el origen y naturaleza de las pasiones).
Madrid, 1800. 93
2.8. Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785–86). Illustration of the
gesture to accompany, “O, that way madness lies; let me shun
that; / no more of that!” (King Lear 3.4.21–2). 94
2.9. The closet scene of Hamlet depicted in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of
Shakespeare (1709). 95
2.10a. Terror, from Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785–86). 96
2.10b. Odium (Odio), a detail from Zeglirscosac, Essay on the origin and
nature of the passions (Ensayo sobre el origen y naturaleza de las pasiones).
Madrid, 1800. 97
2.11. Jean Berain, a public square. For Thomas Corneille and Marc-Antoine
Charpentier’s Médée, Act 1 (Paris, 1693, Académie Royale de Musique). 98
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x List of Figures
2.12. Francesco Bibiena. Design for a stage set drawn in oblique perspective
(known as the scena per angolo), probably for the Teatro Academico
nel Porto, Bologna, 1703. 99
3.1. The Laocoön as it was seen in the eighteenth century. 157
3.2. Charles Le Brun, Acute bodily pain (La Douleur corporelle et aiguë).
Musée du Louvre. 158
5.1. The front matter of Bernardino Stefonio’s Crispus advertising its
performance during games dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Rome:
Carolum Vulliettum, 1601. 216
5.2. Costumes depicted in Justus Lipsius, On the Roman Army (1596), the
source for costumes in a Neapolitan performance of Bernadino
Stefonio’s Crispus, staged in 1603. 218
5.3. Costumes depicted in Justus Lipsius, On the Roman Army (1596). 219
5.4. Choreography for the choral dances performed in Acts 1 and 2 of the
Neapolitan production of Crispus staged in 1603. 227
5.5. Choreography for the choral dance performed in Act 3 of the Neapolitan
production of Crispus staged in 1603. 228
5.6. Choreography for the choral dance performed in Act 4 of the Neapolitan
production of Crispus staged in 1603. 229
5.7. Frontispiece of the original edition of Corneille’s Polyeucte (1643). 236
6.1. Antoine Coypel, Athalie Chased from the Temple (before 1697),
suggested by Racine’s tragedy, Athalie (1690). 262
6.2a. Obverse of a silver medal struck by George Bower, perhaps to mark
Louise de Kéroualle’s creation as Duchess of Portsmouth in 1673. 287
6.2b. The reverse of Louise de Kéroualle’s medal. 287
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PA RT I
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE
TRAGIC AND THE POETICS OF
TRAGEDY
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1
Our Tragic Culture

We owe most of what we know about tragedy to a generation of critics who came
of age in the wake of the French Revolution. For it was they who defined the spirit
of tragedy for the modern world, identified the cultural conditions and moments
in history when it had flourished, and decided which plays that passed under the
name of tragedies were truly tragedies and which ones were not. On one side of
this watershed lay a poetics of tragedy dating back to Aristotle; on the other lay a
philosophy of the tragic established by a circle of intellectuals who gathered at Jena
in the 1790s, writing in the shadow of Immanuel Kant.1 We live with the results
of this intellectual revolution every day. They are part of our mental furniture. But,
like the furnishings of an ancestral home, their provenance is uncertain and the
significance of their initial arrangement forgotten.
If we survey the twentieth century’s most influential criticism of tragedy, we find
a consistent set of claims that can be traced back to this revolution. At the heart of
tragedy, it locates either an unavoidable collision of ethical forces or a conflict be-
tween freedom and necessity.2 Tragedy, writes Bertrand Russell grandly in 1903,
“builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy’s country, on the very
highest summit of the highest mountain; . . . within its walls the free life continues,
while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of
tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty.”3
“The self stresses its self-hood with an all-exclusive, all destroying force,” writes the
young Georg Lukács in a formulation of 1910; it imparts “a steely hardness and
autonomous life to everything it encounters” until “it cancels itself out,” having

1 A number of critics have recognized Friedrich Schelling or one of his contemporaries as the
starting point of a new era of theorizing about the tragic. See Staiger (1935) 41 and (1971) 45–7;
Szondi (2002) 1, where he distinguishes between a “poetics of tragedy” and a “philosophy of the
tragic”; Schmidt (2001) 80–1; and Goldhill (2012) 8, 138–9. Brillaud (2010a) objects that such a
narrative does not do justice to the complexity of eighteenth-century French writing on tragedy, which
includes a philosophical dimension; but I would contend that it does not really include what has
emerged as the idealist philosophy of the tragic. Billings (2014) sees a sharp break around 1800 but
nevertheless perceives roots of the change in the eighteenth century and a continuing role for ­Aristotle’s
Poetics after it.
2 As Sewall (1980) 13 says succinctly, “man is free but fated, fated but free.” Jarrett-Kerr (1965)
371 amplifies the claim: “What is common to these diverse examples are the two elements: (a) you are
not wholly responsible for your fate; therefore your suffering is undeserved, quixotic from man’s point
of view: Moral—puny man must respect what is greater than he. But (b) you are partly responsible for
what you make of your fate, even for part of the fate itself; therefore if you are to keep your self-respect,
you must do something about it (repent, sacrifice, accept): Moral—puny man is still valuable for his
freedom.” Also see Goldmann (1972) 4.
3 Bertrand Russell (1918) 57.
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4 What Was Tragedy?

achieved a “freedom organically born out of its innermost self, identical with the
highest destiny.”4 “Fate must first feel the resistance of freedom, rebound (so to
speak) from the hardness of the hero, and finally crush him,” agrees Paul Ricoeur,
“before the pre-eminently tragic emotion–fiæbo| [fear]–can be born.”5 This
standard of insolubility and inevitability means that “where the causes of disaster
are temporal, where the conflict can be resolved through technical or social means,
we may have serious drama, but not tragedy,” says George Steiner.6 It also dictates
that the “unhappy story must have an unhappy end.”7 Yet the hero is only ennobled
by defeat. If we feel that the “ultimate power is no mere fate, but a spiritual power,”
says A. C. Bradley, “then we also feel that the hero was never so near to this power
as in the moment when it required his life.”8 “In suffering failure,” says Karl Jaspers
simply, “the loser conquers.”9 The hero’s death affirms his ethical superiority to the
gods; serves as a sacrifice dedicated to the national community; or by means of its
very sublimity produces a glimpse of the divine. In Bradley’s Hegelian account, our
ambivalent response to tragedy is triggered by the double aspect of its catastrophe.
For in order to be “truly tragic,” it must strike us as “the act of a power immeasur-
ably superior to that of the conflicting agents, . . . which overbears and negates
whatever is incompatible with it” and may be called “necessity or fate.” Yet the
catastrophe is also “a violent self-restitution of the spiritual unity,” and this “is
the source of our feelings of reconciliation.”10 This characterization of tragedy
is remarkably perdurable. It has persisted in one form or another through the
transformation of classical studies in the nineteenth century into an Altertumswis-
senschaft, a multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, and historicizing study of the ancient
world; through the transformation of literary interpretation by comparative
­anthropology and Freudian psychology at the turn of the twentieth century; and
through the assault on humanism undertaken by post-structuralists in the 1960s.
Not just professed idealists but New Critics, phenomenologists, existentialists,
Marxist materialists, structuralists, and post-structuralists assume, co-opt, and
­revise key elements of it, using their own characteristic vocabulary.
This transcendental idea of tragedy admits no duty to account for all the works
that have passed under the name of tragedy, for the idealist philosophical tradition
that lies behind it disdains Aristotle’s professed goal to philosophize within the
limits of phenomena: It is concerned with the “thing itself.” As the inheritor of this
tradition, I. A. Richards thought nothing of dismissing “the greater part of Greek
Tragedy as well as all Elizabethan Tragedy outside of Shakespeare’s six masterpieces”
as “pseudo-tragedy.”11 Only Sophocles is purely tragic, insists the phenomenologist

4 Lukács (1974) 160, 173. 5 Ricoeur (1967) 218. 6 Steiner (1961) 8.

7 Bradley (1941) 70; cf. Steiner (1961) 8: “any realistic notion of tragedy must start from the fact
of catastrophe.”
8 Bradley (1941) 84. 9 Jaspers (1952) 51.
10 Bradley (1941) 90–1. For a later restatement that reiterates most of these essentials, see Krook
(1969). On the notion of tragic reconciliation in idealist thought, see Billings (2013a).
11 Richards (1948) 231. As Eagleton (2003) 43 observes, “It is remarkable how many general the-
ories of tragedy have been spun out of a mere two or three texts.” But there have, of course, always
been skeptics. “There are only plays, some of which have always been called tragedies, some of which
have usually been called tragedies,” writes Aylen (1964) 8.
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Our Tragic Culture 5

Ricoeur, for even Aeschylus is liable to “destroy the tragic theology,” converting
irrational vengeance to rational justice.12 We might expect that this drive to essen-
tialize—which is one aspect of the idealist critical tradition—would be obstructed
by the historical relativism of some of its earliest proponents, who desired to dis-
play a “universality of mind” that could adapt to the “peculiarities of other ages
and nations.”13 But in practice, the mainstream of the tradition has used its idea
of tragedy, originally derived from a handful of plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles
but later modified to do service for Shakespeare and Racine, as a litmus test to
determine which plays in any age are truly tragic and which ones are merely some-
thing else. This idea of tragedy places a premium on action and collision, not
suffering, while insisting that true action consists of decision, deed, and reflec-
tion.14 “Mere suffering or misfortune” that does not “spring in great part from
human agency, and in some degree from the agency of the sufferer,” it affirms, may
be pathetic but is not tragic.15 It asserts that our response to tragedy is ambivalent.
And with surprising regularity, it presents the tragic as an indictment of the
contemporary.
There is, of course, nothing in this idea of tragedy that limits it to the stage, and
many literary critics have argued that certain epics such as the Iliad or novels such
as Moby Dick or the Brothers Karamazov breathe the spirit of tragedy.16 But when
they limit themselves to the dramatic repertoire, they find that works instantiating
the true spirit of tragedy are rare and have been produced only under certain skies
at particular moments of cultural development or transition: in the Athens of Peri-
cles, when the Athenian people convened annually for their dramatic festival, the
Great Dionysia, conscious of having defended their liberties against the onslaught
of the Persians; in the London of Elizabeth I, when the English people, having de-
fied the Pope and withstood the Spanish Armada, gathered at the Globe Theatre to
behold their national history in a mirror; perhaps in the Madrid of Philip IV, when
the Spanish, at the height of their empire in the New World, gathered in corrales to
watch the plays of Calderón; and just maybe in the theaters of Hamburg and
Weimar, when Goethe and Schiller sought to yoke Sophocles and Shakespeare in
a potent union that could be set in opposition to the oppressive cultural and pol-
itical control of Napoleonic France. As poets writing under an absolute monarch,
Corneille and Racine have often been denied the palm of tragedy by critics writing
in this tradition.17 But those (such as Lucien Goldmann) who insist that Racine
wrote at least a few true tragedies usually argue that what enabled him to see

12 Ricoeur (1967) 228. 13 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 18.

14 The legacy of this definition of action is apparent in historicist essays such as Moretti (1983),
which stresses the importance of decision, action, and reflection on the early modern English stage
and, by extension, the political arena.
15 Bradley (1941) 81. For similar assertions, see Cleanth Brooks (1955) 5; and Krook (1969) 78–9.
For some bracing remarks on the widespread distinction between the tragic and the merely pathetic,
see Walter Kaufmann (1968) 311–12. I agree with Kaufmann that the Greeks and Shakespeare did
not make the distinction.
16 King (1980), Sewall (1980), and Eagleton (2003) are representative examples.
17 For representative examples, see F. Schlegel (1958–) 1: 215; R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 41; Langer
(1953) 337.
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6 What Was Tragedy?

through the Apolline culture of the sun king’s court was the tragic theology of the
Jansenists, which he absorbed as a young boy while living at the Convent of Port
Royal des Champs.18 About the afterlife of tragedy, these twentieth-century critics
are less certain. Some profess to find the spirit of tragedy manifest in the plays of
Ibsen, Ionesco, or Beckett. Others declare that tragedy is dead.19
The urgency with which critics such as Raymond Williams and George Steiner
debated this question in the 1960s gave way in the 1970s and 1980s, under the
influence of anthropology and French post-structuralism, to an assault on the very
notion of the subject, an assault that we might expect to overthrow any trans-­
historical notion of “the tragic.” Instead, it concealed a philosophy of the tragic
in its most basic accounts of the subject’s relationship to social structures. As we
shall see, scholars in the burgeoning field of reception studies have begun to reflect
critically on what this intellectual legacy has meant to the field of classics and to con-
temporary philosophical constructions of modernity.20 But the common conception
of what tragedy is, and therefore of what counts as a tragedy for the purposes of
literary history, remains so thoroughly indebted to the German idealist tradition
that, while we might be tempted to diminish the importance of the tragic or to
denounce its social consequences, it remains hard for us to imagine that tragedy
could be defined in a radically different way or that the tragic repertoire could
include vast tracts of terra incognita if only we drew our map of it differently.
My central claim is that such an alternative vision may be found in the early
modern poetics of tragedy—in the poetics that emerged around 1550 with the first
major commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics and that continued to develop until the
1790s, when Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, and
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel penned the first fragments of the new philosophy
of the tragic that would displace it. If we are conscious of this pre-Kantian poetics
at all, we tend to think of it as a dusty collection of arbitrary rules pedantically
­insisting on the three unities of place, time, and action (only the last of which
­Aristotle really valued) rather than as a fair rendering of Aristotle or a sympathetic
response to the contemporary genius of Shakespeare and Calderón. But we are
wrong to do so. For although some commentators did treat Aristotle and Horace
as infallible authorities who had taught rules that should never be transgressed,
numerous interesting writers valued the Poetics less as a set of fixed prescriptions
than as a series of contestable judgments that pointed, however cryptically, to a
whole range of ancient critical opinions, lost plays, and alternative tragic styles
whose existence Aristotle recorded incidentally. These authors were not content to
take Aristotle as their sole authority. They tested his claims against the whole
corpus of Greek and Roman tragedy, and they consulted and cited just about every
other ancient author whose remarks on the theater, rhetorical persuasion, or the
performing arts survived. Apuleius, Athenaeus, Aulus Gellius, Cicero, Heron of
Alexandria, Horace, Julius Pollux, Lucian, Macrobius, Plutarch, Quintilian,
18 Benichou (1971); Goldmann (1964). For refutations, see J. Pommier (1954) and Sellier (1979).
19 On the viability of modern tragedy, see M. Harris (1932) and Raymond Williams (1966); on its
death, see Steiner (1961); on the debate, see Eagleton (2003) 203–40.
20 For recent examples, see Leonard (2005); Goldhill (2012); Billings (2014).
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Our Tragic Culture 7

S­ idonius Apollinaris, and Vitruvius all had a say in this poetics as well. Early
modern critics were not in agreement on every point any more than the generation
of the Schlegels was, but, like the idealists, they shared a working vocabulary
and common assumptions that were profoundly consequential for their account
of tragedy.
That account underwrote and was in turn informed by most of the tragedy and
tragic opera produced in Europe before 1795: the neoclassical and baroque tra-
gedies of Italy and France; the solemn tragedies of the Jesuits; the sacred tragedies
of humanists such as George Buchanan, Hugo Grotius, and John Milton; the early
operas of Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Cavalli; the tragédies en musique
of Jean-Baptiste Lully and his successors; the opera seria championed by Gian
Vincenzo Gravina and brought to perfection by Pietro Metastasio; and the “reformed”
operas of Tommaso Traetta and Christoph Willibald Gluck. It is worth attending
to this body of early modern criticism because the idealist philosophy of the
tragic has obstructed our capacity to respond intelligently to most of this tragic
repertoire. Only by reviving the pre-Kantian poetics of tragedy can we re-experience
early modern tragedies as they were received at the moment of their appearance
in history.
Important consequences follow from this effort of historical reconstruction.
Early modern tragedy becomes a strange and expansive terrain with stretches of
real beauty and sublimity, even if regions of it may prove to be of more interest to
cultural historians than to theater audiences. Our understanding of early modern
subjects is also enriched. For cultures reveal some of their deepest beliefs and anx-
ieties when they define tragedy. What’s more, because the early modern account of
tragedy is bound up with a conception of the self—and, therefore, of literary rep-
resentations of the self—that is not our own, reconstructing it pays a valuable
dividend: It brings us closer to the notion and experience of early modern person-
hood. Finally, aspects of Attic drama and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy that were
occluded by the idealist philosophy of the tragic emerge to view once again.
The early modern conception of tragedy—which I would describe as a norma-
tive description rather than a reified idea—is as much a product of history and
happenstance as the post-Kantian one. Because it was available to and codified by
poets and audiences in the early modern period, however, it should be privileged
as a means of reconstructing the original “horizon of expectations” for the early
modern tragic repertoire.21 Like any self-contained system of ideas, it can also be
used to isolate terms and assumptions that are crucial to rival systems of thought
like Aristoteleanism or Idealism. It cannot tell us what is tragic any more than the
idealist philosophy of the tragic can. The burden of making that judgment is passed
down from one generation to another in cultures that value the category. But it can
transform two and a half centuries of our cultural legacy into a more usable past by
leading us to the threshold of a lost world, the world of Trissino, Dryden, and
Gluck. And it can remind us that Europeans once lived without any category of the
tragic, though they saw tragedies everywhere around them.

21 Jauss (1983) 28.

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8 What Was Tragedy?

T H E E A R LY M O D E R N C O N C E P T I O N O F T R A G E D Y

For much of the long period stretching from the seventh to the fifteenth cen-
turies, when the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were unknown and
Seneca was encountered for the most part in treasuries of wit, even the most
learned lexicographers pulled up short when they encountered terms like tragicus,
Euripides, and tragediarum clamor in Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy.
Tragicus might become “a wise man named Tragicus”; Euripides could be glossed
as “a certain Greek philosopher”; and “the clamor of tragedies” could be rendered
as the “songs of jugglers.”22 To be sure, Horace’s The Art of Poetry, Diomedes’ The
Art of Grammar, and Donatus’ commentary on Terence—all of which define and
contrast comedy and tragedy from the Roman point of view—were available to
readers. Even Aristotle’s Poetics became available from a remove when Hermann
the German produced a Latin translation of Averroës’ gloss on the Greek text in
1256. But Averroës treated tragedy as a species of logic rather than a performed
poetic art.23
Not until 1550 were the conditions in place for the re-emergence of a full-blown
poetics of tragedy. By then Giorgio Valla’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics had been
available for half a century. The works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and
Seneca had been circulating in print for three decades or more. And Francesco
Robortello’s and Vincenzo Maggi’s pathbreaking university lectures on the Poetics
had appeared in print as learned textual commentaries. These were just the first in
a stream of translations, commentaries, and original poetics that flowed uninter-
rupted for two centuries until the appearance of works such as Henry James Pye’s
A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle by Examples Taken Chiefly from the
Modern Poets (1791).24 By the early nineteenth century, Aristotle and Horace had
lost considerable authority as guides to tragedy, and interpretations of the Poetics
were increasingly inflected by the philosophical developments of the 1790s.25
The most important conviction that emerges from the early modern poetics
of tragedy is that pathos is the one indispensable element of tragedy. The Poetics
­encouraged critics in this belief, for although Aristotle identifies recognitions,
­reversals, and pathos as the three building blocks of a tragic plot, he also speaks of
simple, pathetic tragedies like the Ajax, which lack either recognitions or rever-
sals.26 Commentators concluded that, although Aristotle held complex plots in
particularly high esteem because recognitions and reversals were effective means of
stimulating the passions, pure displays of pathos were tragic and were in themselves
the primary goal and justification of tragedy. Bernardino Tomitano, who made
extensive use of the Poetics as early as 1545, distinguished tragedy from genres like

22 H. A. Kelly (1993) 73, 158–61. Also see Munk Olson (2000).

23 Reiss (1999a) 232–5.
24 See, for example, Weinberg (1961) 1: 349–796; and Cave (1988) 55–143.
25 Cave (1988); Billings (2014) 100–4.
26 Aristotle, Poetics 1452a12–b13, 1455b32–56a3. For comments on the simple, pathetic tragedy
exemplified by the Ajax, see, for example, Robortello (1548) 160, 210; Vettori (1576) 177; Piccolimini
(1575) 255; and Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 34–5.
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Our Tragic Culture 9

comedy and satire according to the “passions of our common humanity” that each
represented: “As for the passions, tragedy imitates hopes, desires, despair, weepings,
deaths remembered, and deaths.”27 A century later, the abbé d’Aubignac main-
tained that tragedies could be “rais’d out of Passions” alone, transporting the actors
“into extraordinary and violent Sentiments, by which the Spectators are ravish’d,
and their Soul continually mov’d with some new Impression.”28
The primacy of pathos in any definition of tragedy appeared to be justified by the
end of the genre: to effect through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions
(Poetics 1459b27–8). Because the whole weight of the ancient rhetorical tradition
maintained that the best way to move the passions of an audience was to exhibit
those passions, it seemed perfectly reasonable to define tragedy not as the imitation
of an action but (as Milton does in his preface to Samson Agonistes) as a grave and
profitable poem “of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of
those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure
with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.”29
It can be hard for us to take Milton at his word. Even the judicious critic John
Steadman slips into saying what Milton must have really meant. Milton “obviously
held a broader view of tragic effect” than this passage “would appear to indicate,”
says Steadman: he must have recognized that “the proper ‘delight’ of tragedy arose
not only from imitation of the passions but from imitation of an action.”30 In
other words, it is inconceivable that Milton did not see what idealist and romantic
criticism, especially as it became co-involved with the classical philology of nine-
teenth-century Germany, has taught us to see.31
Although many classicists now maintain that Aristotle was thinking of pathos
itself as an action involving suffering or pain when he named it one of the three
building blocks of tragedy, his early modern translators knew that the term pathos
usually referred to a passion, and they translated it with words that could refer to
an emotional disturbance or spiritual pain. (Valla uses affectus; Robortello and
Heinsius favor perturbatio; Vettori opts for passio; and Castelvetro and Piccolomini
choose the Italian equivalent passione.) In a world in which a passion or affection
was conceived as the soul’s passive suffering of the strong movements of spirits and
fluids in the body when the mind formed some judgment that an object promised
good or evil, no unwritten law banished passive suffering from the tragic stage.
To be sure, tragedies of revenge and overweening ambition such as Orbecche
(1541), The Spanish Tragedy (1582–92), and Macbeth (1606) may feature heroes
who impose their will on recalcitrant circumstances and meet a doom of their own
devising. But early modern audiences also valued tragedies that consisted of little
more than scenes of suffering and woe laced together, such as Calderón de la Barca’s
beautiful 1629 tragedy The Constant Prince (El príncipe constante), which dramatizes
the enslavement and degradation of Prince Ferdinand of Portugal. These audiences
elevated to the purple abandoned lovers such as Dido and Ariadne, victims of war
such as Sophonisba and Cleopatra, and martyrs such as St. Eustachius and Prince

27 Tomitano (1545) 228. 28 d’Aubignac (1684) 1: 68.

29 Milton (1997) 355. 30 Steadman (1971) 179. 31 Jones (1962) 12.
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10 What Was Tragedy?

Ferdinand because the depth of feeling and the nobility of bearing exhibited by
these figures marked them as tragic. Their sense of tragedy was sharply different
from that of W. B. Yeats, who declared grandly in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse
(1936) that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies,
tragedy is a joy to the man who dies” (xxxiv). Even when early modern audiences
hung on the dilemmas of heroes and heroines riven by competing ethical claims
in plays such as Antony and Cleopatra (1607) and Le Cid (1637), they valued such
conflicts on affective grounds. Situations like these are common in tragedies, explains
Corneille, because “the opposition of natural feelings to the transports of passion
or the severity of duty creates powerful agitations that are experienced by the audi-
ence with pleasure.”32
The importance of scenes of passive suffering to early modern tragedy’s effects is
underlined by the challenge that they pose to critics such as Bradley who endeavor
to read Shakespeare’s tragedies through the lense of Hegel. The problem is particu-
larly stark in the case of King Lear (1605), whose “principle characters . . . are not
those who act, but those who suffer.” Forced to concede that “Lear suffers but
hardly initiates action at all” after the first act, Bradley suggests that Goneral, Regan,
and Edmund must be treated as the “leading characters” because they “initiate
­action.” Conscious that the melancholy of Hamlet, the dotage of Lear, and the
sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth might be said to diminish their responsibility for
their ends, he insists that Shakespeare never introduces such abnormal states of
mind as “the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment.” Honest enough to report
that the “most nearly intolerable spectacle” in Shakespeare is the “suffering of
Desdemona,” he even attributes the power of the scene to Desdemona’s inaction:
“Desdemona is helplessly passive. She can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate
in speech; no, not even in silent feeling.”33 According to the post-Kantian phil-
osophy of the tragic to which Bradley adheres, however, mere suffering like this can
never be tragic, no matter how painful it may be to watch. Early modern critics felt
no such compunction.
Identifying pathos as the essence of tragedy meant that the genre was not defined
by any set plot trajectory. To be sure, the idea that tragedies should end badly found
some support in the Poetics, where what is now often taken to be the interpolation
of a scholiast misleadingly explains that the reason Aristotle calls Euripides the
most tragic of poets is that most of his plays end unhappily (Poetics 1453a22–31).
It found even clearer confirmation in the influential treatise on Terence produced
by the fourth-century grammarian Aelius Donatus, which states, in an excursus on
comedy taken from the grammarian Evanthius, that “in comedy all is turbulent at
the beginning and tranquil at the close,” while “in tragedy events unfold in the
contrary order.”34 But early modern commentators could not ignore two stubborn
facts: that many Attic tragedies do not end in misery; and that, if it pronounces

32 Discours de la tragédie (1660) in Corneille (1984) 1: 72.

33 Bradley (1992) 42, 8, 152. For early complaints on this head, see Lily B. Campbell (1930)
app. A, B.
34 Donatus (1902) 21. When no translator is indicated in parentheses or in the notes, translations
are mine. On the Donatan tradition, see Cunningham (1951) 36–51 and H. A. Kelly (1993) 1–15.
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Our Tragic Culture 11

Oedipus the Tyrant better (beltion) than other tragedies in one place, the Poetics
elsewhere declares the pattern of Iphigenia among the Taurians to be the best (kratiston)
(1454a5–9).35 With these observations in hand, early modern critics set out to
correct the misimpression that tragedy was, as Chaucer has it, a tale of “prosperite
for a tyme that endeth in wrecchidnesse.”36
J. C. Scaliger exclaims in 1561, for example, that “it is by no means true, as has
hitherto been taught, that the unhappy outcome is essential to tragedy—provided
it contains horrible events.”37 In his edition of all the surviving texts and fragments
of Latin tragedy (1593–95), the erudite Jesuit Martin Delrio observes that Aristotle
himself “does not deny that it is possible to divert tragic action from atrocious
misfortune into an unexpected happiness, as in Euripides’ Orestes, Alcestis, Androm-
ache, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Ion, and we see it in some parts of Seneca’s
Hercules Oetaeus.”38 Vulgar grammarians are simply wrong to say that the endings
of tragedy and comedy form an essential difference, says his fellow Jesuit Maciej
Kazimierz Sarbiewski, one of the great neo-Latin poets of the seventeenth century,
for a tragedy may have a happy ending mixed with fear, and a comedy an unhappy
one mixed with festivity.39 “It is clear from Euripides himself that the prosperous
ending is permissible,” says Heinsius in 1611, “though the philosopher noted that
most of his works end in a different way. To say nothing about the others, what is
more joyful than the close of Alcestis, when the dead wife is restored to her hus-
band? What sort of play is Iphigenia in Tauris, after the brother recognizes his sister,
the sister her brother, and both escape?”40 It must be for this reason that Sarbiewski
insists that the tragic passions include not just pity and fear but (on occasion)
vehement joy.41 The attitude of Gerardus Joannes Vossius is typical. Although he
concedes that a tragedy must set before our eyes an “unhappy condition or a ser-
ious danger,” he cannot approve of any definition of tragedy that insists upon an
unhappy ending. “This is indeed mostly the case,” he explains in 1647, “but it does
not belong to the essence of tragedy.”42
The recuperation of the tragedy with a happy ending is not confined to Latin
commentaries. Giovan Battista Giraldi, who dominated the theory and practice of
tragedy in Ferrara from 1541 to 1563; d’Aubignac, who codified the principles
of French tragic dramaturgy under Cardinal Richelieu in the 1630s; Michelangelo
Torcigliani, who established the tragic credentials of Monteverdi’s first public operas
for Venice in 1641; and John Dryden, who dominated not only the Restoration stage
but the criticism of English tragedy before Thomas Rymer, all defend the form in
theory and practice.43 Even Joseph Addison, who praises the capacity of “Terrour
and Commiseration” to leave a “pleasing Anguish in the Mind,” does not “dispute
against this Way of writing Tragedies” (in which the “Favourites” of the audience

35 On this apparent contradiction, see Moles (1979) and Stephen A. White (1992).
36 Boece 2.2.70–2 in Chaucer (1987). 37 Scaliger (1905) 59.
38 Delrio (1593–95) 5. 39 Sarbiewski (1954) 458. 40 Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 56.
41 Sarbiewski (1954) 458. 42 Vossius (2010 [1647]) 1: 459, 461.
43 Giraldi (1554) 203–7, 220–4; Horne (1962) ch. 2, 4; Torcigliani (2007) 386; d’Aubignac
(1684) 4: 140; The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 233.
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12 What Was Tragedy?

are ultimately redeemed from suffering) “but against the Criticism that would
­establish this as the only method.”44
From Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai’s l’Oreste of 1525, through Guymond de la
Touche’s admired Iphigénie en Tauride of 1757, to Gluck’s and Goethe’s masterful
treatments of 1779, Iphigenia among the Taurians, with its doleful anticipations of
sacrifice and its joyous recognition between brother and sister, was treated by poets
and audiences as a touchstone of tragedy. They responded with equal fervor to
the numerous attempts to recreate Euripides’ lost Cresphontes (or Merope), another
example of tragedy in which a recognition of the “best kind” averts disaster, this time
a mother’s slaughter of her son. In a letter prefaced to Voltaire’s version of the tragedy,
M. de la Lindelle (unmasked by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as none other than Vol-
taire himself) reports that this averted murder appears to all the literati whom he has
consulted in France and Italy “past dispute, the most touching and the most truly
tragic subject there ever was in the theater.”45 By the time Voltaire was writing, the
subject had been brought on stage many times, starting in the late sixteenth century,
when Antonio Cavallerino (Modena, 1582), Giambattista Liviera (Vicenza, 1588),
and Pomponio Torelli (Parma, 1589) all dramatized it.46 Cardinal Richelieu was the
first to bring the subject to Paris (1641), but the next sixty years saw the production
of three new versions of the tragedy, including one by Racine’s protégé Lagrange de
Chancel (1701). In the early eighteenth century, Italian poets recouped the subject.
The Venetian librettist Apostolo Zeno, who aimed to reform opera librettos on the
model of ancient and French classical tragedy and who became the court poet
of ­Emperor Charles VI in Vienna, wrote a Merope that was first set to music by
Francesco Gasparini in 1712, then reset at least twenty-eight times by the likes of
Giacomelli (1734), Jommelli (1741), Terradellas (1743), Perez (1750), Gassmann
(1757), and Traetta (1776).47 Zeno’s libretto inspired his friend Francesco Scipione
Maffei to undertake a declaimed tragedy on the same subject (1713).
Not only was Maffei’s tragedy the inspiration for the English Merope of 1731, it
provided the impetus both for Voltaire’s French revision of 1743 and for Alfieri’s of
1782. In his autobiography, Alfieri said that this Merope challenged him to prove
that, although Maffei’s was “the best and only tragedy” hitherto written in Italy, it
was not the best “that ever could be written.”48 By 1858, when Matthew Arnold
chose Merope to convey the “peculiar power, grandeur, and dignity” of Greek
­tragedy to readers whose appreciation of classical beauty had been dissipated by
decades of poetry and criticism produced by the “romantic school,” the subject
represented a good old cause, a particular understanding of classical beauty that
had been superseded by the philosophy of the tragic.49 Tragedies like Merope are a
far cry from the Jacobean tragedies of rebellion, over-reaching, and revenge that are
more familiar to us, but these offspring of Euripides are just as essential a part of

44 No. 40, April 16, 1711 in Addison (1965) 1: 169–70.

45 “Lettre de M. de la Lindelle à M. de Voltaire” in Voltaire (1973–) 17: 235.
46 On the tradition of Merope tragedies, see Petrovska (1984). On the Italian cinquecento versions,
see Herrick (1962) 101–21 and Ariani (1974) 289–332.
47 Cauthen (2015). 48 Alfieri (1845) 178.
49 Matthew Arnold (1858) vii–xlviii, esp. vii–x.
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Our Tragic Culture 13

the early modern tragic repertoire as the Donatan tradition that descends from
Seneca and that defines tragedy rhetorically as the opposite of comedy.
Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers might object that Iphigenia
among the Taurians and Cresphontes (or Merope) are tragicomedies, melodramas,
romances, or dramas of reconciliation, not tragedies, and that Aristotle’s “final
preference” for plays based on such formula “is the manifestation of a jaded critical
palate.”50 Of these terms, only tragicomedy has a renaissance pedigree as a dramatic
genre. Yet Battista Guarini, author of the immensely influential 1585 pastoral
tragicomedy The Faithful Shepherd (Il pastor fido) and the greatest theorist of the
genre, states clearly that tragicomedies are different from tragedies with happy end-
ings. Defending his play in a treatise of 1588, he maintains that tragicomedy takes
from tragedy “the great personages, but not the action; the verisimilar plot, but not
true; the passions moved, but blunted; delight, not melancholy; danger, but not
death.” It takes from comedy “controlled laughter, modest jests, the contrived
knot, the happy reversal, and above all the comic order.” Tragicomedy presents
“a serious action performed by illustrious personages,” but it does not aim to
arouse terror. It is “tragic” only “in potentiality,” not “in action.” It does not purge
terror and pity, for its end is comic: to purge by means of delight the passion of
melancholy.51 If modern tragicomedy has any classical pedigree, observes the sev-
enteenth-century Jesuit Tarquinio Galluzzi, it must be those plays (described by
Aristotle but lost to posterity) in which high and humble characters mix, and in
which sworn enemies such as Odysseus and the suitors, or Orestes and Aegisthus,
depart friends (Poetics 1453a31–9).52
Tragedies with happy endings, whether ancient or modern, are a different thing
entirely. Their events, says Giraldi in 1554, “should come about in such a way that

50 I quote Moles (1979) 92, who, despite offering one of the most insightful expositions of
Aristotle’s preference for plots like that of Iphigenia, cannot suppress his disappointment in the
critic or his low estimation of such plays, which he compares to “detective stories, thrillers, and
Science Fiction.” Kitto (1954) devotes chapters to Euripides’ “tragicomedies” and “melodramas”
and calls Iphigenia among the Taurians by turns a “tragi-comedy” and a “romantic melodrama”
(327). Commenting on Aristotle’s praise of Sophocles’ Oedipus the Tyrant and Euripides’ Iphigenia
among the Taurians, Else (1967) 446 remarks, “the Iphigenia cannot honestly be called much more
than a good melodrama.” Walter Kaufmann (1968) concurs, saying that Aristotle clearly took Iphi-
genia among the Taurians “much more seriously than most modern critics do, and it is not easy to
see how one could place it in the same class with Oedipus Tyrannus and rank the plot higher to boot.
It is also striking that Euripides is praised in the preceding chapter for being ‘the most tragic of the
poets,’ while here two of his plays (the Crephontes is his, too) win the highest praise for their happy
endings.” For Kaufmann, the implication is clear: “Aristotle nowhere embraces anything that might be
called a tragic world view,” and if we ask whether Aristotle does not therefore defend “melodramas,”
there is no reason to say that he would not favor tightly written ones (70, 73). Stinton (1975) 254
describes the formula for realizing plays like Iphigenia in Tauris as “the typical schema for melo-
drama.” On the critical history of describing Euripides’ tragedies as melodramas, see Michelini
(1987) 321–3. The “drama of reconciliation” is a term favored by Hegel but seldom imitated. It is
not, however, the happy ending of Iphigenia among the Taurians that disturbs Hegel the most but
“the barbaric cruelty of the human sacrifice,” which we can no longer recognize as a legitimate vol-
itional activity; see Hegel (1920) 4: 281.
51 Guarini (1588) 19v, 27–27v, quoted and translated in Weinberg (1961) 2: 659–60. I have made
minor changes to the translation.
52 Galluzzi (1621) 320.
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14 What Was Tragedy?

the spectators are suspended between horror and pity until the end.”53 Tragedies
that move from misery to felicity in this manner can be purgative, explain late
­sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century authors such as Lorenzo Giacomini and
Alessandro Donati, because the prospect of an impending evil can move us as
powerfully as a present one.54 A poetics of tragedy that identifies the genre with
pathos—and particularly with the purgation of the passions through the arousal of
pity and fear—has no trouble recognizing ancient tragedies such as Iphigenia
among the Taurians or modern reimaginings such as Gluck’s Alceste as tragedies. It
can simply observe (with Addison) that “Good and Evil happen alike to all Men
on this Side the Grave. . . . For this Reason the ancient Writers of Tragedy treated
Men in their Plays as they are dealt with in the World, by making Virtue some-
times happy and sometimes miserable.”55 What system of ideas made it necessary
to reclassify such works?

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE TRAGIC

The philosophy of the tragic that requires such acts of renaming takes its begin-
nings from Friedrich Schiller’s appropriation of Kantian terms and preoccupations
to characterize the peculiar achievements of Greek art. Schiller’s admiration for the
Greeks had already been quickened in 1787 when the renowned singer and actress
Corona Schröter read Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris to him, but not until he began
his serious study of Kant in 1792 did he feel equipped to account for the peculiar
effects of tragedy.56 In keeping with Kant’s distinction between the mathematical
and the dynamic sublime, Schiller defines a theoretical and a practical species. A
peaceful ocean is theoretically sublime because it brings with it a notion of infinity,
but a stormy ocean is practically sublime because it poses a danger that we are in-
capable of opposing with our physical powers. “The irresistible power of nature,”
says Kant in a passage that Schiller quotes at greater length, “provides us, regarded
as sensuous beings, with the knowledge of our impotence; but at the same time it
uncovers in us a capacity to judge ourselves independently of nature, and a super-
iority over nature.” We experience the frightful power of nature as sublime, in
other words, because it makes us conscious of an answering power “to regard as
trivial everything for which we are concerned as sensuous beings.” This is precisely
the effect of tragedies, argues Schiller, which nevertheless leave us secure enough to
be receptive to what is ultimately an aesthetic experience. Both “a vivid image of
suffering” and “an image of resistance to the suffering” are required if tragedy is to
“call into consciousness the mind’s inner freedom.” A hero who exerts his power to
overcome what is fearful may be magnificent, but he cannot be sublime. Neither,
for that matter, can a hero who is consoled in death with thoughts of immortality,
for the promise of eternal life diminishes death’s fearfulness and consoles our
53 Giraldi (1554) 221, trans. in Giraldi (2011) 219, where Javitch renders “orrore” with the more
Aristotelean “terror.”
54 Giacomini (1972 [1586]) 370–1; Donati (1633) 134–6.
55 No. 40, April 16, 1711 in Addison (1965) 1: 169. 56 Sharpe (1991) 98, 118–40.
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Our Tragic Culture 15

sensuous nature, which must be “completely set aside” if we are to be left with
“reason alone” for reassurance.57
Schiller produced his theory of tragedy while lecturing on history and aesthetics
at Jena, where he would in time be joined on the faculty by Johann Gottlieb Fichte
and August Wilhelm Schlegel and in the student body by Friedrich Hölderlin,
Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, and Friedrich Schelling, young seminarians from
Tübingen who roomed together at Jena. Schelling was still a student when, in a
creative response to his discussions with Hölderlin, he produced a pure statement
of the new philosophy of the tragic:
Many a time the question has been asked how Greek reason could bear the contradic-
tion of Greek tragedy. A mortal, destined by fate to become a malefactor and himself
fighting against this fate, is nevertheless appallingly punished for the crime, although
it was the deed of destiny! The ground of this contradiction, that which made the
contradiction bearable, lay deeper than one would seek it. It lay in the contest between
human freedom and the power of the objective world in which the mortal must suc-
cumb necessarily if that power is absolutely superior, if it is fate. And yet, he must be
punished for succumbing because he did not succumb without a struggle.58
In other words, the contradictions of Greek tragedy are nothing less than a dem-
onstration of the divorce between moral freedom and natural necessity forecast in
the second antinomy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), legislated in the
Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and assumed in Kant’s description of the sub-
lime as an ambivalent experience in the Critique of Judgment (1790). The sublimity
to which the hero of a tragedy aspires is the preservation of his moral autonomy
even in death, the ultimate manifestation of natural necessity and the limit of our
material being. The high art of tragedy can teach us something that the clear light
of reason cannot, says Schelling: “that there is an objective power which threatens
our freedom with annihilation” and that, “with this firm and certain conviction in
our heart,” we ought “to fight against it exerting our whole freedom” and ought
“thus to go down.”59
Schelling retains this account of Oedipus the Tyrant as the kernel of his analysis of
tragedy in The Philosophy of Art, a series of lectures that he prepared for the Univer-
sity of Jena from 1799 to 1805, adding the consequential claim that the reason
tragedy leaves us feeling “healed” and “cleansed,” as Aristotle claims in his cryptic
discussion of tragic catharsis, is that it vindicates free will.60 Schelling refers to only
a handful of tragedies, but each is put to the service of his theory: The votes on the
guilt or innocence of Orestes are evenly divided in the Eumenides to preserve the
balance between freedom and necessity, while Oedipus’ self-imposed punishment
constitutes, as a voluntary act, “a recognition of freedom and the honor due to it.”61
As some classicists have objected, Schelling’s interpretation of these plays does not
withstand scrutiny, for the “pollution” that accrues to Oedipus has little in common

57 On the Sublime in Schiller (1995) 27, 29–30, 35, 44, 32. 58 Schelling (1980) 192–3.
59 Schelling (1980) 192. For an influential reaffirmation of the kernel of Schelling’s reading of
Oedipus Tyrannos, see Dodds (1983) 187. Also see Courtine (1993); and Billings (2014) 80–97.
60 Schelling (1989) 254. 61 Schelling (1989) 255, 253.
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16 What Was Tragedy?

with Christian guilt, and neither a notion of the will nor a distinction between the
spirit and body can be securely attested as Greek.62 Oedipus’ acceptance and affirm-
ation of his own suffering, his redemptive act of submission to a higher will, may
be tinged by more than trace of Christianity, as Joshua Billings suggests.63 Indeed,
in chapter 5 we shall hear the guiltless hero of a sixteenth-century Jesuit tragedy
accepting responsibility for a deed he did not commit in terms that could have
been penned by Schelling and that are explicitly predicated on the example of
Christ. But for our purposes now, what matters more is the currency that Schelling’s
claims achieved in the nineteenth century. A. W. Schlegel (who was influenced by
Schelling and who in turn loaned his own lectures and translations to his friend)
affirms that Attic tragedy finds “its absolute beginning in the assertion of Free-will”
and its “absolute end” in “the acknowledgment of Necessity.”64 Hegel faults Kant
for locating these contradictions in the realm of reason, but he nevertheless charac-
terizes tragedy as the product of a historical clash of freedom and necessity.65
Identifying the contradictions of Attic tragedy with some form of the Kantian
paradox—or at least, with a stage in the historical revelation of freedom—has
important consequences. To begin with, it leads critics to focus almost exclusively
on the isolated tragic hero as a moral agent, site of spiritual conflict, and political
actor; to overlook tragedies that lack such a clear hero; and to underestimate the
significance of the chorus and other ancillary persons.66 The tragic hero, according
to Schelling, must possess such an “absoluteness of character” that there can never
be any doubt how he would act. “Indeed, lacking any other fate, his own character
would have to take its place. No matter what the nature of the external elements,
the action must always emerge from within him.”67 If one begins with a standard
like this, it becomes difficult to interpret plays such as Sophocles’ The Women of
Trachis and Euripides’ The Trojan Women, both of which lack a central character
who could be said to generate the action from within.
Kant also influences the way critics writing in his wake define the action that is
generated. For Aristotle, as John Jones explains, “tragic action presents the translu-
cent and vital quiddity of a life event.”68 For many early modern critics, it may
comprise any kind of motion, including the movements of a soul buffeted by
contradictory passions. But for idealists, who assume that the self should, ideally,
be absolutely free and sovereign, action is a volitional operation entailing reso-
lution, performance, and reflection. It is never far removed from violence, for any
engagement with the world around it will entail conflict. Whereas neither Aristotle
nor his early modern commentators stress the centrality of conflict to tragedy
because doing so might suggest that the theater could be an incitement to social
disorder, Hegel can make collision a center-piece of his theory of tragedy because
he considers contradictions necessary to the advance of human freedom and the
revelation of absolute truth through time.69

62 See, for example, Silk and Stern (1981) 308–10. 63 Billings (2014) 87.
64 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 242. 65 Hegel (1920) 2: 181–2.
66 Goldhill (2012) 175–9. 67 Schelling (1989) 256.
68 Jones (1962) 29. 69 Gellrich (1988).
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Our Tragic Culture 17

If their devotion to freedom leads idealist critics to focus on the tragic hero as a
site of moral conflict and to redefine action as the imposition of his spirit on the
world, their preoccupation with the second term of Kant’s antinomy, necessity,
leads them to stress the role of fate in tragedy, for they observe that the Latin fatum
can mean anything from a fact of nature to destiny. In his article on “Tragedy” in
the Encyclopédie (1765), Jean-François Marmontel had faulted the Greeks for their
over-reliance on extraneous causes such as destiny, the anger of the gods, and
fate.70 In sharp contrast, Schelling insists that Aristotle’s emphasis on the mistake
of the tragic hero (hamartia) is misguided: it is “necessary that this guilt itself be
necessity, and that it be contracted not through error, as Aristotle says, but through
the will of destiny and an unavoidable fate, or by the vengeance of the gods.”71
The idealist definition of necessity in turn leads German critics to diminish the
importance of pathos. Schiller and A. W. Schlegel consider pathos a manifestation
of the power of nature and necessity over man, one that is tolerable on the stage
only when counterbalanced by a stubborn opposition of the will that demonstrates
our moral freedom. In his Berlin lectures of 1802–3, A. W. Schlegel had warned
that in their haste to accept Aristotle’s account of tragedy’s purgative action, listeners
should not forget Plato’s complaint that exaggerated and melting lamentations
could make audiences soft (Republic 10.604d–605a), a complaint that Schlegel
believed was specifically directed at Euripides.72 This emphasis on resistance to the
importunities of the body and the bodily passions bears a certain resemblance to
the neo-Stoicism of early modernity and even to some of the Jesuit theories that we
will consider in chapter 5. But it is very far indeed from another strain of early
modern drama that presents the experience of being as a matter of feeling more
than willing, a strain that flourished in regimes in which volition was reserved for
the monarch and in which an affective plenitude was the fullest form of living that
most subjects could call their own. Schelling insists that the notion of misfortune
obtains only as long as the “will of necessity” is not apparent. Once the fate of the
hero “lies open before him,” “and precisely at the moment of greatest suffering,”
“he enters into the greatest liberation and greatest dispassion.”73 This paradox, as
we shall see in chapter 3, owes a good deal to Johannes Joachim Winckelmann’s
interpretation of Laocoön’s pain, but it is not the most thorough-going attempt to
defuse the pathos of tragedy. Hegel actually reclaims pathos to the side of free will
by defining it as “an essential part of the content of rationality and free will,” and
a “volitional activity” that should be “self-determined and essential.”74
No matter how they define pathos, idealist critics need to reconceptualize plays
such as Prometheus Bound, the Ajax, and the Philoctetes as something other than
vivid displays of suffering. “Aeschylus’ Prometheus does not suffer merely because
70 Diderot and d’Alembert (1765), s.v. “Tragédie,” an article attributed to Jean-François Marmon-
tel, qt. at 33: 841; also see Behler (1986) 346–7.
71 Schelling (1989) 252. The appeal of fate to romantic critics is ably explained by Novalis: “Insofar
as I render a higher meaning to what is ordinary, a mysterious appearance to what is customary, an
infinite look to what is finite, I am romanticizing. . . . Nothing is more Romantic than what we cus-
tomarily call the world and Fate”; see Novalis (1941) 441.
72 A. W. Schlegel (1884) 2: 351–2. 73 Schelling (1989) 254.
74 Hegel (1920) 1: 308–9, 311, 325.
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18 What Was Tragedy?

of external pain,” explains Schelling, “but rather much more deeply in his inner
feeling of injustice and oppression.” “Freedom triumphs over necessity” in the play
because, even in the midst of his “personal suffering,” “only the universal rebellion
against the unbearable dominion of Jupiter motivates him.”75 This is just one
­instance of the more general tendency of these critics to posit a will that must be
opposed to the visible displays of suffering. Their desire to see that will revealed in
all its glory, and to assume that it can only be revealed in extremis, was whetted by
Winckelmann’s influential interpretations of the Laocoön and the Belvedere Torso,
which in both cases imagine an undisturbed plenitude of being emerging from the
most dire circumstance: Laocoön achieves a repose of spirit even as he is tangled in
the folds of dire necessity, and Heracles (the supposed subject of the Torso) reflects
on his labors after having been ravaged by poison and burned alive.76 Kant rein-
forces the importance of such subjects by suggesting that, if freedom is a mere idea,
it can only be known through inference as the invisible power opposed to nature
or necessity, and its full extent can only be appreciated when it is at last overcome.
This is what it means to Schelling to “prove one’s freedom by the very loss of that
freedom, and to go down with a declaration of free will.”77 This is what lies behind
Hölderlin’s gnostic equation: “Everything that is original appears not in its original
strength, not truly, but genuinely only in its weakness,” and therefore “when [nature]
presents itself in its strongest gift, the sign = 0.” The clearest presentiment of abso-
lute being is the death of the hero.78 For Hegel, that death is the moment when
truth is demanded because it marks the crisis of the unique facing the universal, of
pure singularity being carried off in the universal movement toward extinction.79
For Hölderlin, that movement is enacted in the very language of tragedy. As Denis
Schmidt explains, “the rhythm that is specific to the tragic poem—a rhythm
defined by its interior countermovements and by the moment of the caesura—is
the rhythm which leads us to the point at which no content, no image or represen-
tation, is what we learn of ourselves. It leads us, rather, to the point at which we
learn that we are nothing but time, and at this point we learn as well the nature of
our destiny which ends in death.”80 Tragic language is bittersweet because it reveals
the identity of life and death.
What is important to stress here is how many elements of the tragic that we
might ordinarily suppose to be distinct traits that happen to recur in many plays
and that may therefore be said to reveal a family resemblance among tragedies—
violent conflict, the isolation of the hero, assertions of free will in the face of the
inevitable, and destruction of the individual—are in fact the corollaries of one

75 Schelling (1989) 261. 76 Potts (1994) 4.

77 Schelling (1980) 193. Hegel (1920) had other reasons for maintaining that tragedies should end
in the destruction of the hero. He assumed that what made a dramatic collision tragic was the fact that
characters embodying ethical powers incurred guilt through their opposition to other valid ethical
laws and had to be destroyed in order to purify the true ethical idea of one sidedness.
78 Hölderlin, “The Significance of tragedy” (1802) in Bernstein, ed. (2003) 193.
79 Schmidt (2001) 90–2.
80 Schmidt (2001) 149. On Hölderlin, also see R. B. Harrison (1975); Fóti (2006); Lacoue-Labarthe
(1989); and Billings (2014) ch. 7.
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Our Tragic Culture 19

grand axiom: that the contradictions of Greek tragedy instantiate the paradoxes of
human freedom, which are disclosed in our experience of tragic sublimity.

L I T E R A RY F O R M , T H E P H I L O S O P H Y
O F H I S TO RY, A N D T H E C A N O N

Schelling, the Schlegels, and Hegel turned Oedipus the Tyrant, Antigone, and
Hamlet into touchstones to which each new generation of philosophers and critics
appeals in an effort to register their own novelty, even as they insert themselves into
a critical tradition. But these idealist critics could not have done so with such
lasting effect if they had not argued that history itself had anointed these works
and if they had not invented a new way to describe literary form that could be used
to appraise both Sophocles and Shakespeare.
They found an important model for their historical method in Winckelmann’s
1764 History of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums). Johann
Gottfried von Herder reported that he read the book through seven times. The
Schlegel brothers studied it in the archeology seminar of Christian Gottlieb Heyne.
And Hegel assured his classes that it had “opened up for the spirit a new organ and
totally new modes of treatment.”81 Winckelmann purported to present not just a
chronology of art but a historical system that could chart “the origin, growth,
change, and fall of art, together with the various styles of peoples, periods, and
artists.”82 He wrote (albeit sparingly) of art as a seed that had to be germinated in
a particular soil and invigorated by a particular climate. He treated the culture of
the Greeks as an organic whole animated by a single, reigning spirit of liberty. And
he saw the apex of their achievement as the product of a historical hiatus when
political liberty had been lost but not forgotten and the forces of historical neces-
sity were held at bay.83
It was the very resistance of Shakespeare’s tragedies to the early modern poetics
of tragedy, with its emphasis on elegant design, its aversion to the particulars of
history, and its insistence that the persons of tragedies should not be individuals
but species, which promoted the creation of a new ideal of literary form and the
elaboration of a philosophy of history that could account for the emergence of a
recognizably modern subjectivity in works such as Hamlet (1601). Before the mid-
eighteenth century, critics who examined Shakespeare in light of the early modern
poetics of tragedy typically praised his superb depiction of the manners and pas-
sions of men but faulted the conduct of his fables, his admixture of tragedy and
comedy, and his overly figurative and turgid language.84 But rather than simply

81 Hegel (1975) 1: 63. 82 Winckelmann (2006) 71.

83 On Winckelmann’s historicism, see Meinecke (1972) ch. 7; Potts (1994) ch. 1; Harloe (2013).
84 See, for example, Ravenscroft, preface to Titus Andronicus; Tate, dedication to King Lear; Gildon,
“Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy”; Gildon, An Essay on the Art, Rise, and Progress;
Purney, preface to Pastorals; Theobald, preface to Richard II, all in Vickers, ed. (1974–81) 1: 238–9,
344–5, 2: 63–71, 218–19, 316–21, 352–6. Also see Babcock (1931); Sabor and Yachnin, eds. (2008);
Ritchie and Sabor, eds. (2012).
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20 What Was Tragedy?

making allowances for such defects, as most prior critics had, Edward Young
­denied them outright in 1759. An original art like Shakespeare’s, explains Young,
“may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root
of Genius; it grows, it is not made. Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture
wrought up by those Mechanics, Art and Labour, out of pre-existent materials not
their own.”85 Young’s poetics of genius was warmly embraced by the Storm and
Stress movement in Germany. But it was his comparison of original composition
to organic growth and his likening of imitation to mechanical reproduction that
would prove especially consequential.86 For it not only changed the way critics
described literary form; it altered the way critics and philosophers of history such
as Herder interpreted the records of the literary past.
Herder was not alone in insisting in the 1770s that the tragedy of ancient Greece
and modern Europe could not be compared because they were produced under
sharply different cultural conditions. It was on precisely these grounds that Guillaume
Dubois de Rochefort objected to Charles Batteux’s 1746 The Fine Arts Reduced to
a Single Principle (Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe).87 The language of
Herder, who outlined his theories of cultural history in the 1770s before embodying
them in his 1784–91 Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Ideen
zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit), was, however, more widely influential.
Under its spell, literary historians told the story of solitary geniuses who developed
from seeds to mighty trees in distinct historical climates, giving definitive form
to the culture of their own folk.88 Critics looked for the distinctions rather than
the continuities between the ancients and the moderns, those born to the clear
light of the Mediterranean and those bred in the mists of northern climes, and they
concluded that any trans-historical or international style of dramaturgy was an
­illusion, an imperial imposition, or a mongrel. Genuine literatures were national
and written in the mother tongue—the most pure and natural expression of a
people’s spirit.
By the time A. W. Schlegel delivered his Lectures on Dramatic Art in Vienna in
1808, he had had time to synthesize Herder’s vision of cultural history with
the philosophy of the tragic that he and Schelling had begun to formulate at Jena.
Although we now think of Hegel’s account of tragedy as a more significant land-
mark in the history of philosophy, we should not underestimate the effect of
Schlegel’s readable lectures on the formation of our modern canon. They appeared
in four editions (1809, 1816, 1845, and 1846) and were translated into almost every
European language. Goethe did not exaggerate when he said that the distinction

85 Young (1759) 8–9.

86 See Kind (1906); Abrams (1953); Jonathan Bate (1997) 157–86; Gigante (2009).
87 See Billings (2014) 46–53.
88 On the “historical turn” in the interpretation of Greek tragedy in the late eighteenth century, see
Billings (2014) ch. 2. For the larger context of this historical turn, see Berlin (1998) 326–435; Butterfield
(1955); Meinecke (1972); Reill (1975); Megill (1978); Leventhal (1994); Forster (2002a) and
(2002b); Ziolkowski (2004); Carhart (2007); Grafton (2007); Robert E. Norton (2007); Legaspi
(2008); and Beiser (2011). On Herder, see Robert T. Clark, Jr. (1995); Adler and Koepke, eds. (2009);
and Zammito (2002) and (2009).
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Our Tragic Culture 21

between classic and romantic, which he claimed to have originated in dialogue

with Schiller, traveled around the world in these lectures, for they made their
impression not only directly but indirectly through the contemporaneous lec-
tures of Schelling and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who appropriated many of their
key terms, distinctions, and critical enthusiasms.89 In his Introductory Lectures on
Aesthetics (1820s), Hegel himself acknowledged the crucial role that the Schlegels
had played as mediators between “the Renaissance of philosophy” and the reading
public. “Being covetous of novelty and with a thirst for what was striking and
extraordinary,” these brothers “appropriated as much of the philosophical idea
as their natures, which were anything but philosophical, and essentially of the
critical stamp, were capable of absorbing.” Relying only on their “critical under-
standing,” they “set themselves somewhere near the standpoint of the Idea, and
with great plainness of speech and audacity of innovation . . . directed a clever
polemic against the traditional views.” In doing so, they erected a “new standard
of judgment.”90
What was this new standard? First, A. W. Schlegel insists that all true art be
an organic and native expression of the spirit of a nation. And second, he asks
that tragic art display “the moral freedom of man” in a conflict with “sensuous
impulses” because “a spiritual and invisible power can only be measured by the
opposition which it encounters from some external force capable of being appreci-
ated by the senses.”91 He is frankly unapologetic about the fact that the ancients,
and in particular Aristotle, never enunciated this criterion:
It was in this reference to a higher idea, that we previously found the unity and whole-
ness of Tragedy in the sense of the ancients; namely, its absolute beginning in the
assertion of Free-will, and the acknowledgment of Necessity its absolute end. But
we consider ourselves justified in affirming that Aristotle was altogether a stranger to
this view; he nowhere speaks of the idea of Destiny as essential to Tragedy. Indeed, we
must not expect from him a strict idea of action as a resolution and deed.92
According to Schlegel, the development of Greek tragedy was “subject to an invari-
able law.” “Everything heterogeneous was first excluded, and then all homogeneous
elements were combined” into a “harmonious unity” whose peculiar attributes
were “the ideality of the representation, the prevailing idea of destiny, and the
chorus.” Aeschylus prepared the way, but Sophocles realized that ideal unity in the
“finished symmetry and harmonious gracefulness” of his style. Schlegel acknow-
ledges that the moderns have “read, admired, and imitated” Euripides more often
than his predecessors.93 He himself had been inspired to revise Euripides’ Ion in
1801 for performance in the Weimar Court theater under the direction of Goethe.
And in an 1807 comparison between Euripides’ Hippolytus and Racine’s Phèdre, he
had found it expedient to praise the noble simplicity, the natural language, and

89 March 21, 1830 in Goethe (1850) 2: 273. 90 Hegel (1993) 69.

91 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 242. 92 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 242.
93 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 242, 95, 79, 112.
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22 What Was Tragedy?

the fatality in Euripides’ tragedy—all to the detriment of Racine.94 In his Lectures

on Dramatic Art, however, he stresses the chasm that separates Aeschylus and
Sophocles (on the one hand) from Euripides (on the other).
In Euripides, Schlegel complains, “fate is seldom the invisible spirit of the
whole composition, the fundamental thought of the tragic world.” Necessity too
often degenerates into “the caprice of chance,” so that it can no longer be used
for “its proper purpose, . . to heighten the moral liberty of man.” What’s more,
Euripides fails to respect “the mutual subordination, between character and pas-
sion and ideal elevation”: “Passion with him is the first thing.” His reliance on
bold stage spectacles and ocular effects is out of keeping with a poetic art, and
many of the attractions that he introduces to tragedy, such as Cretan monodies,
are of foreign extraction and therefore out of step with the Attic spirit.95 This
­“insurrection of individual parts against the unity of the whole is exactly what in
the organic world is decomposition,” Schlegel had explained in his earlier lectures
in Berlin (1802–3). Such decadence is “the more horrible and repulsive the nobler
the structure it destroys, and it must fill us with the greatest disgust in this most
eminent of literary kinds.”96 In short, Euripides is guilty of destroying “the internal
essence of tragedy” and of sinning “against the laws of beauty and proportion in
its external structure.”97
In order to retain tragedies like Prometheus Bound and the Philoctetes in his
canon, Schlegel describes them as plays in which the hero does not simply endure
but “suffers and resolves from the beginning to the end.”98 The accumulation of
hapless suffering in a play like The Trojan Women merely wearies us, he claims. The
plays that survive his litmus test are Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Oresteia, all
of Sophocles’ tragedies except The Women of Trachis, and Euripides’ Hippolytus, the
Bacchae, and (with caveats) Medea.
Seneca’s tragedies are “beyond description bombastic and frigid, unnatural
both in character and action, revolting from their violation of propriety, and so
destitute of theatrical effect” that they could not have been meant to leave the
rhetorical schools for the stage. They have nothing in common with the “sublime
creations of the poetical genius of the Greeks.” “Their characters are neither ideal
nor real beings, but misshapen gigantic puppets, who are set in motion at one
time by the string of an unnatural heroism, and at another by that of a passion
equally unnatural, which no guilt nor enormity can appal.”99 Had it not been for
Seneca’s influence on modern tragedy, says Schlegel, he would have passed over
him entirely.100
Among modern nations, the principle of imitating the ancients has reigned in
Italy and France, while the “romantic principle” has predominated in England and

94 Comparaison entre la Phèdre et celle d’Euripide (Paris, 1807) in A. W. Schlegel (1846–47) 14:
333–405.
95 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 113–15. On Schlegel’s condemnation of Euripides, see Snell (1953)
113–35 and Behler (1986).
96 A. W. Schlegel (1884) 2: 358, trans. in Wellek (1955) 2: 48.
97 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 115. 98 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 93.
99 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 211. 100 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 212.
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Our Tragic Culture 23

Spain. Forgetting his earlier dictum that the true connoisseur ought to adapt
­himself to the peculiarities of all nations, Schlegel dismisses most Italian, French,
English, and German tragedies without a hearing. Indeed, in the case of whole
centuries (like the Italian cinquecento), he dismisses the repertoire without a read-
ing.101 He saves all his admiration for the two dramatists he had translated with
such acclaim, Shakespeare and Calderón. And they deserve “to be called great” not
as tragedians but as the authors of plays that are neither tragedies nor comedies but
“romantic dramas.”102
For Schlegel (as for Hegel, who invokes the same categories), the distinction
between classical and romantic art is both formal and historical. Classical art,
which presupposes a natural harmony between man and nature, was the product
of a peculiar phase in the development of Attic culture—a phase brought to a close
by the questions of the sophists, the tragedies of Euripides, and the death of
Socrates.103 In a profound sense, Attic tragedy was a mode of inquiry that preceded
the metaphysical tradition. With philosophy (and to an even greater extent, Chris-
tianity) arrived a consciousness of discord between man and nature, form and
matter, that made the Greek ideal of a plastic or sculptural dramaturgy impossible.
Its successor, romantic drama, had to struggle to unite what no longer appeared to
be united, had to strive after the infinite, knowing that it could do so only at the
cost of formal imperfection.
Schlegel’s aesthetic judgments stem from his philosophy of history. Like Hegel, he
values Aeschylus and Sophocles as the greatest exponents of a world view that has
been forever lost, a world view that accorded a dignity to art and enabled a formal
perfection that can never be recuperated. He derogates Euripides because, as a poet
who straddles the division between the classical and romantic periods of history,
he does not embody the genius of the Greek people at the height of their cultural
development. Only after the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the
Counter-Reformation could the self-consciousness that defines modernity be said to
have reached a state of maturity in the works of Shakesepare and Calderón. Modern
dramatists who have been misguided enough to emulate the Greeks have missed
the temper of the times just as surely as Euripides missed the temper of his. He was
essentially a romantic dramatist when he should have been a classical one; they
have tried to be classical dramatists when they should have been romantic ones.
Schlegel wrote his lectures with Napolean’s shadow looming over him. The
­emperor had exiled Schlegel’s patroness, protégé, and employer Madame de Staël
in 1803 and 1806 for her espousal of German culture. During the same years, he
had defeated the Austrian army and occupied Vienna; reorganized Germany’s
western states into the Confederation of the Rhineland, elevating the rulers of
Saxony and Bavaria to the status of vassal kings; and defeated the Prussian army,
entering Jena and Berlin in 1806. The occupation of Berlin had inspired Johann
Gottlieb Fichte (who was on close terms with the Schlegels), to address the German

101 Bergel (1966) 766. 102 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 342.

103 On the importance of Socrates to narratives of modernity from Hegel to postmodernity, see
Paul R. Harrison (1994); and Leonard (2012).
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24 What Was Tragedy?

people as if they themselves were tragic heroes unfettered “by pain” and courageous
enough to look the truth “in the eye.” Despite their military defeat, Fichte main-
tained, the Germans were in a unique position to liberate Europe, for only the
Germans, among the modern Europeans, had retained an original language on par
with Ancient Greek. Everywhere else, tribes had adopted the dead language of the
Romans. Just as German Protestants had once fought for the promise of eternal
life, German speakers should today be “fired by the all consuming flame of the
supreme love of fatherland that cloaks the nation in the eternal, for which noble
spirits gladly sacrifice themselves.”104 In this history-as-tragedy, the pursuit of action
unto death, undaunted by physical pain and inspired by adherence to a higher
ideal, would bear the fruit of liberty.
Schlegel’s lectures, which he delivered in Vienna in 1808 and then refined for pub-
lication in Heidelberg, could hardly be innocent of this context, particularly because
Fichte’s immediate prescription was not military resistance, which seemed futile, but
cultural renewal through a reformation of the educational system. Dramatic poetry
could naturally play its part in such a renewal. But if the Germans were to produce
great drama, Schlegel maintained, it would have to be the drama of a nation:
Only let our historical drama be in reality and thoroughly national; let it not attach
itself to the life and adventures of single knights and petty princes, who exercised no
influence on the fortunes of the whole nation. Let it, at the same time, be truly histor-
ical, drawn from a profound knowledge, and transporting us back to the great olden
time. In this mirror let the poet enable us to see, while we take deep shame to ourselves
for what we are, what the Germans were in former times, and what they must be
again. Let him impress it strongly in our hearts, that, if we do not consider the lessons
of history better than we have hitherto done, we Germans . . . are in danger of dis-
appearing altogether from the list of independent nations.
German literature—which, for Schlegel, is always conceived in opposition to
French neo-classicism—must not be “alienated from the body of the people.” For
“foreign manners” and “exotic literature,” when “transplanted from its natural cli-
mate into hot-houses,” can only yield a “miserable fruit.”105 The well-spring of
German literature must therefore be its original language. The drama that Schlegel
has in mind should presumably be written in the spirit of Goethe’s Götz von Berli-
chingen (1773), a history play set in the era of Martin Luther that chronicles the
ultimately doomed resistance of a feudal aristocrat to the encroachment of civil
law and the Holy Roman Empire. Götz dies with the words “Freedom! Freedom!
[Freiheit! Freiheit!]” on his lips, and those who remain behind intone solemnly,
“Noble, noble man! Woe to the age that rejected you! [Edler edler Mann. Wehe
dem Jahrhundert, das dich von sich stieß!]”, “Woe to the posterity that fails to
­appreciate you! [Wehe der Nachkommenschaft die dich verkennt!]”106 The play

104 Fichte (2013) 11, 54, 57, 61, 80, 101. On Fichte’s nationalism, see Kohn (1949) and Abizadeh
(2005).
105 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 528–9.
106 Götz von Berlichingen (1773), text in Goethe (1985), trans. (with slight difference) in Goethe
(1980) 218.
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Our Tragic Culture 25

must have seemed even more relevant to the circumstances in which Schlegel
found himself lecturing than it had at its first performance in 1774. It “conveys
a great historical meaning,” says Schlegel, “for it represents a conflict between a
departing and a coming age; between a century of rude but vigorous independ-
ence, and one of political tameness.”107 Schlegel hopes that, by beholding their
history in the public theater, Germans might become newly conscious of their shared
identity and their heritage of freedom.
Having arrived at the end of Schlegel’s account of dramatic literature, we should
reiterate why he feels free to dismiss so much of the early modern tragic repertoire.
First, the early modern identification of tragedy with pathos does not necessarily
produce plays exhibiting all the hallmarks expected by a philosophy of the tragic:
action, collision, fate working as an invisible spirit, the death of the hero, and
the intimation of moral freedom that his destruction yields. Second, Schlegel’s
conception of genius as a form of self-legislation opposed to all forms of imitation,
cultural transmission, and miscegenation renders problematic two of the most vital
creative procedures of the Renaissance, aemulatio and contaminatio (rivalrous imi-
tation and creative admixture), neither of which is a form of slavish copying. Third,
the value that he and his contemporaries place on the realization of individual
liberty in an organic state means that they are attracted to playwrights such as
Sophocles and Shakespeare, who, to their minds, registered the claims of the heroic
individual on the state and, conversely, of the community on him. The tragedies of
Seneca (written under the emperor Nero), of Racine (written under Louis XIV), or
of the Jesuits (written in the service of an apostolic mission) could never satisfy
their desire for dramas of national discovery. And finally, because Schlegel defines
tragedy as a poetic art (as do so many romantics who regret the experience of seeing
Shakespeare performed), he inevitably disapproves of Euripides’ reliance on scenic
effects and musical innovations and must insist that tragedy and opera are distinct
species with different spirits and peculiar laws.108 Many commentators writing
from 1550 to 1795, on the other hand, reason that if tragedy can purge the passions
in a way that epic cannot, then its secret must lie in the wonders of representation:
scenes, costumes, gestures, expressions, dance, and music.
The lectures of Schlegel and Hegel exercised a continuous and direct influence
on academic accounts of tragedy into the twentieth century (and have continued
to exercise a more discontinuous and indirect one to this day). Their effect is as
palpable in the writings of Sir Richard Jebb, the leading classicist of his day, as it is
in A. C. Bradley, the leading Shakespearean. Jebb is positively lyrical on the
“plastic” quality of Greek tragedy and the distinctness of the Attic spirit.109 But his

107 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 515. 108 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 136, 217.

109 In a passage influenced by Walter Pater’s tribute to Winckelmann in The Renaissance, Jebb con-
trasts Greek art with oriental and medieval art, contending that it alone “regards the soul as reflecting
its own divinity upon the body.” At the apogee of his cultural achievement, the ancient Greek was like
Narcissus “looking into the deep, clear waters where the mirror of his image shows the soul, too,
through the eyes, Narcissus in love with the image that he beholds,—but Narcissus as yet master of
himself,—as yet with a firm foot-hold upon the bank, not as yet possessed by the delirious impulse to
plunge into the depths” of modern self-consciousness. Greek tragedy has been rightly compared to
sculpture because it is essentially “plastic.” Rather than depicting sculpture as a fall into egoism from
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26 What Was Tragedy?

more sober commentaries on Sophocles, which remain unsurpassed, may have

done more to consolidate Schlegel’s opinions as stylized facts. After tracing the
­absorption of Schlegel’s account of Electra into the commentaries of Jebb and his
contemporaries, Simon Goldhill concludes, “It would be hard to demonstrate
more clearly the circle of mutually confirming critical opinion stemming back to
Schlegel’s authoritative lectures.”110 We could trace a similar line from Bradley
back to the German idealists. Declaring Hegel to be the only philosopher who had
treated tragedy “in a manner both original and searching” since Aristotle, Bradley
set out in 1901 to show that “Macbeth, a tragedy as far removed as possible from
the Antigone as understood by Hegel, is still of one nature with it, and equally
­answers” to Hegel’s account of tragedy, provided we are prepared to look into the
soul of the hero to find the requisite clash of goods and waste of spirit.111 That is
precisely what Bradley did in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), a book that was soon
accepted by the profession as the acme of a great tradition of character criticism
inaugurated by Maurice Morgann and refined by A. W. Schlegel, Coleridge, and
Hazlitt (Bradley’s most frequent interlocutors). “Nothing better in its kind need be
expected,” wrote D. Nichol Smith after reviewing the first 300 years of Shakespeare
criticism. Even in the twenty-first century, we can find an eminent scholar of
Euripides (the Attic tragedian most poorly served by the idealist account of tra-
gedy) offering a definition of the genre that might have been dictated by Schelling:
“Ancient tragedy offers the spectacle of a combat that pits men against destiny and
the gods, an unequal combat which ends in suffering and death most of the time,
but which exalts human dignity.”112

T R A G E D Y B O R N A N E W F RO M T H E S P I R I T O F M U S I C ?

The philosophers and critics who gathered in Jena and Berlin in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries shared a philosophical starting point in the Idealism
of Kant and Fichte; a conviction that the French Revolution and Napoleon’s military
aggression demanded a response at once political, philosophical, and cultural; and
a faith that a revival of the tragic spirit might renew the German people. They held
so many ideas in common that Friedrich Schlegel coined the terms symphilosophy

the public integrity of tragedy, as Wagner does, Jebb portrays tragedy as a historical development
out of sculpture, a troubling of its “perfect repose,” an introduction of social conflict. But he insists
that “the typical character” of Greek art persists: “Those unchanging attributes which, on the one
hand, bring man near to the gods or, on the other, mark his brotherhood with the dust and the limits
of his mortal destiny are presented in emphatic, untroubled lines; and, when Retributive Justice has
done its work, that blitheness out of which the passions rose into a storm returns subdued to the
graver and deeper calm that follows a transcendent contemplation.” As a way of contrasting the
ancient Greek from modern man, Jebb remarks that had Hamlet been able to stop with his speech,
“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving
how express and admirable!”, he would have been a Greek, but he could not stop because “he was
sick with a modern distemper.” Jebb (1962 [1888]) xciv n. 1, xcv–xcix. Cf. Pater (1919 [1873])
169–73, 185–7.
110 Goldhill (2012) 214. 111 Bradley (1941) 89. 112 Jouan, ed. (2004) lv.
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Our Tragic Culture 27

and sympoetry to describe the production of works that defied attribution to

particular individuals.113
We might employ these terms with equal justice (if more numerous qualifica-
tions) to a triumvirate who revised the idealist philosophy of the tragic in conse-
quential ways in the mid-nineteenth century: Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard
Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer, who trained at Berlin and Jena,
wrote The World as Will and Representation in 1818 but remained overshadowed
by his colleague and rival Hegel until he issued a greatly expanded version of
his masterpiece in 1844. Wagner began publishing his ideas on opera, theatrical
reform, and national renewal as early as 1834, but he did not write his mature aes-
thetic manifestoes—Art and Revolution (1849), The Art-Work of the Future (1850),
and Opera and Drama (1852)—until his hopes for revolution in Saxony were
dashed by the failure of the May Uprising in Dresden and he was forced to flee
to Switzerland in order to evade arrest for his political activities.114 These manifes-
toes show him trying to synthesize elements from three overlapping intellectual
traditions. The collectivism and anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Ludwig
Feuerbach, and Mikhail Bakunin inform his attacks on commercial society, the
modern state, and Christianity. The grand accounts of historical development and
national identity that he found in Lessing, Herder, Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, and the
Schlegel brothers lie behind both his history of artistic decline after ancient Greece
and his appeal to an artwork of the future as a means of social renovation. And
Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which he read for the first time in 1847 in Johann Gustav
Droysen’s German translation and reconstruction, seemed to provide a historical
instantiation of his revolutionary ideal. In none of these manifestoes is Wagner
influenced by Schopenhauer, for he discovered The Will and the World as Repre-
sentation only in 1854. The point is worth stressing because Nietzsche would
eventually conclude that Wagner had not, in fact, revived the spirit of tragedy
­because his artistic project was initially framed in ignorance of music’s capacity to
be a “direct expression of the Will” pitted “against the physical things of this
world.” But that remained for the future. From 1860–61, when Nietzsche dis-
covered The Will and the World as Representation in a bookshop in Leipzig and
studied the score of Tristan und Isolde, through 1869–72, when he visited Wagner
more than twenty times in Tribschen, reading the composer’s theoretical works,
enjoying “a practical course in Schopenhauerian philosophy,” and reciting drafts of
his own Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche esteemed Schopenhauer and Wagner as teachers
and prophets.115 Even as late as 1876, he remained prepared to speak of the mys-
terious affinity between Wagner and Aeschylus.116
Like almost every German aesthetician since Winckelmann and Schiller, the
Wagner of Art and Revolution asserts that any diagnosis of modern art must com-
mence with an examination of ancient Greece as both a point of origin and the
binary opposite of all that ails the contemporary. “Before what phenomenon,” he

113 F. Schlegel (1968) 141.

114 On Wagner’s involvement in the Dresden uprising, see Mitchell Cohen (2008).
115 Silk and Stern (1981) 32. 116 Nietzsche (1990) 263.
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28 What Was Tragedy?

asks, “do we stand with more humiliating sense of the impotence of our frivolous
culture, than before the art of the Hellenes?”117 Disclaiming any desire to restore “a
sham Greek mode of art,” Wagner looks backwards to the tragedies of Aeschylus,
the historical apogee of drama, to find the revolutionary form that the artwork of
the future must take.118 Wagner credited these with decisively molding his “ideas
on the significance of the drama, and of the theater in particular.”119 As “worthy
and adequate expressions of the public conscience,” Aeschylus’ tragedies were
conservative. Their performance was both religious and civic, an occasion for
Athenians to stream by the thousands from the State-assembly and the Agora to
the theater, there “to read the riddle of their own actions” and “to fuse their own
being and their own communion with that of their god” (Apollo) before returning
in “stillest peace” to their lives of “restless activity and accentuated individuality.”120
Whereas A. W. Schlegel and many of his contemporaries maintained that Sophocles
brought Attic tragedy to maturity, Wagner argues that art’s public nature began to
diminish immediately after Aeschylus thanks to the “sophist needles of the egoistic
spirit of Athenian self-dissection,” which dissolved the common bonds of religion
and custom and undid the artwork of the Folk.121 The result of this process was
not just the dissolution of a natural community into a polis of rivalrous citizens but
the disintegration of tragedy into the distinct arts that developed henceforth “in
lonely self-sufficiency.”122 If we accept Wagner’s selective chronology, tragedy is an
art form that precedes sculpture, whose masterpieces are products of this egoistic
phase of Greek civilization.123
In Wagner’s grand history, the 2,000 years that have passed since the decadence
of Greek tragedy belong to philosophy, not to art. Because it became impossible for
art, which is life-affirming, to express the “self contempt, disgust with existence,”
and “horror of community” that prevailed under the Roman empire, Christianity
emerged to do what art could not.124 The rebirth of art known as the Renaissance
became possible only when the Church “openly proclaimed herself ” to be “a
worldly despotism appreciable to the senses.” Yet, as dispiriting as Wagner finds it
to see art taken into the service of churchmen and princes bent on hindering the
development of free, self-conscious communities, the relationship between the
state and the work of art declined yet again in the nineteenth century when art sold
herself to commerce.125
As Wagner imagines how tragedy might be born anew in these parlous social
and artistic conditions, he appeals to the example of three artists before all others.

117 Art and Revolution and The Art-work of the Future in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 32, 89.
118 Art and Revolution in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 33, 54.
119 R. Wagner (1983) 342. 120 Art and Revolution in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 33–4.
121 Art and Revolution and The Art-work of the Future in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 52, 136.
122 Art and Revolution in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 52.
123 The Art-work of the Future in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 166.
124 Art and Revolution in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 35–7.
125 Art and Revolution in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 41–2. In his contemporaneous Judaism in Music,
published anonymously in 1850, Wagner lays much of the blame for this unhealthy relationship
between capitalism and art at the feet of “the Jew.” See R. Wagner (1973) 25 and Mitchell Cohen
(2008) 53–60.
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Our Tragic Culture 29

In the tragedies of Aeschylus he finds a historical realization of the Gesamtkunst-

werk, a synthesis of all the arts made possible by their yearning toward one another.
Nietzsche explained this yearning with particular clarity in the tribute to Wagner
that he delivered at Bayreuth:
[E]verything visible in the world tends to deepen and intensify itself by becoming aud-
ible, and seeks its own lost soul; and . . . , equally, everything in the audible world seeks
to emerge into the light in visible form, seeks, that is, its own incarnation. [Wagner’s]
art carries him always in two directions . . . . He is continually compelled . . . to translate
visible movement back into pure spirit and primal life, and in turn to see the hidden
fabric of the inner world made manifest . . . . All this is the very essence of the dithy-
rambic dramatist . . . —a term we must take from the single perfect manifestation of the
dithyrambic dramatist before Wagner, that is, from Aeschylus and his Greek rivals.126
Yet however much Wagner may have pressed the connection between Aeschylus
and himself in his self-publicity, he also recognizes a sharp division between ancient
and modern, Mediterranean and Germanic. Those divisions necessitate that he look
for the mythic basis of his drama in the native sagas of the Germans, which are
neither Greek nor Christian, and which should enable Shakespeare and Beethoven
to reach out hands to each other.127 Shakespeare is important to Wagner because
he stands for the romantic rather than the classic, the organic rather than the
mechanic, the native rather than the alien, the spontaneous rather than the studied,
the popular rather than the courtly.128 The plastic individuality of his characters is
a reminder of the full identity that can be achieved in the absence of the modern
state apparatus, and the theatrical conditions in which his plays were realized—in
Wagner’s idealized account, by an equal company of improvisational players who
performed for a popular audience with a ready imagination—suggest that the art-
work of the future should be created by a self-directing collective of the fatherland’s
dramatists and composers.129 The entire tradition of modern drama that takes its
origin from the “Greek Drama as looked at through the misunderstood rules of
Aristotle,” that works from mechanism into life, and that includes all courtly forms
of drama from Racinian tragedy to opera, is a false-start. Although Wagner praises
Christopher Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as “load-stars on the
midnight sea of operatic music,” it is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that points to
the music of the future because its choral movement redeems “Music from out her
own peculiar element.”130
As Wagner considers what sort of action his drama should present, he draws
another contrast between ancient and modern. “The Greek Fate is the inner Nature-
necessity, from which the Greek—because he did not understand it—sought refuge

126 Nietzsche (1990) 276.

127 Opera and Drama and Art-work of the Future in R. Wagner (1895–99) 2: 161; 1: 141.
128 Opera and Drama in R. Wagner (1895–99) 2: 124.
129 Plan for the Organization of a German National Theater for the Kingdom of Saxony (1848),
On Eduard Devrient’s “History of German Acting” (1849), and Theater Reform (1849) in R. Wagner
(1895–99) 7: 319–60, 8: 218–21, 222–5.
130 The Art-work of the Future in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 126. On Wagner’s reception of Beethoven,
see Kropfinger (1991).
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30 What Was Tragedy?

in the arbitrary political State. Our Fate,” he says, bearing in mind Napoleon’s
­oft-quoted remark to Goethe that politics had replaced fate in the modern world,
“is the arbitrary political State, which to us shews itself as an outer necessity for the
maintenance of Society; and from which we seek refuge in the Nature-necessity.”131
Rather than seeing a struggle between a noumenal freedom and a phenomenal neces-
sity at the heart of tragedy, Wagner sees a collision between the individual and the
political, between a drive that may include unconscious instinct and the forces of
social resistance. This formula preserves the antithetical structure of tragedy. The
hero of such a drama must die, Wagner explains, because an action will strike us as
“completely truthful” only if in the “effectuation of his personal force,” the hero
goes under, throwing “overboard his personal existence” for the sake of “bringing
to the outer world the inner Necessity which ruled his being”:
He proves to us the verity of his nature, not only in his actions—which might still
appear capricious so long as he yet were doing—but by the consummated sacrifice of
his personality to this necessary course of action. The last, completest renunciation
(Entäusserung) of his personal egoism, the demonstration of his full ascension into
universalism, a man can only show us by his Death; and that not by his accidental, but
by his necessary death, the logical sequel to his actions, the last fulfillment of his
being.132
In Greek tragedy, according to Wagner, the hero represented the Folk, and the
chorus represented the judgment of the Folk on itself. It was no regression but an
advance when the chorus was able to “step down from the stage and back into the
Folk itself ” in Shakespeare’s plays.133 Because “none but accurately distinguishable
individualities can lead our interest captive,” the orchestra alone must now serve
the function of the chorus, giving voice to our expectations, guiding our responses,
and arousing our foreboding.134
Wagner’s influence on the young Nietzsche can scarcely be overstated. For the
composer’s use of dissonance suggested how the “joy aroused by the tragic myth”
might spring from the incommensurable, and his speculation that dramatic action
might be conceived as a dream image analogous to music may have inspired
Nietzsche’s account of tragedy as a strife between the Apolline and the Dionysian.
Apollo, the god of sculpture, reason, dreams, and appearances, is manifest in the
dialogue and action. Dionysus, the god of music, intoxication, and the spirit, is
manifest in the satyr chorus. The chorus are the origin of the drama because the
stage action is their dream. Nietzsche’s dialectic owes few of its contrasts to the
­actual cults of Apollo and Dionysus in the ancient world, as Ulrich von Wilamowitz-
Moellendorff finally realized after attacking the historical and philological founda-
tions of Nietzsche’s book: “Apolline and Dionysiac are aesthetic abstractions like
naïve and sentimental poetry in Schiller, and the old gods only supplied sonorous
names for the contrast”: “Once again, the Greeks, as the absolute pattern of an

131 Opera and Drama in R. Wagner (1895–99) 2: 179.

132 The Art-work of the Future in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 198–9.
133 Opera and Drama in R. Wagner (1895–99) 2: 60.
134 Opera and Drama in R. Wagner (1895–99) 2: 304, 340.
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Our Tragic Culture 31

artistic people, were to be shown to have lived, felt, created what modern theory
would prove to be absolutely perfect.”135 Nietzsche’s dialectic does, however, owe
a debt to Winckelmann’s and Schlegel’s discussions of the sculptural quality of the
dramatic action in Greek tragedy and the musical quality of its chorus, to Hegel’s
characterization of tragedy as a synthesis of epic action and choral lyricism, and to
Schopenhauer’s dialectic of the world as representation and the will as thing-in-
itself (a dialectic in which perception, judgment, and reasoning are all placed on
the worldly side of the ledger, while the acts of the will, the actions of the body, and
absolute music are set against it). The struggle between these opposing abstractions
is played out over the body of the hero, who, whether as Dionysus himself or as a
surrogate for him, begins the drama as an individuated man and ends it torn
asunder—at one again with the soul of the race and of nature itself. Only this
­destruction of phenomena can permit us to see the spirit behind them. This is
an account of tragedy that relies heavily on the Bacchae’s descriptions of the
Dionysian spirit, though Nietzsche nowhere acknowledges this in The Birth of
Tragedy.136
The strife between the Apolline and the Dionysian permits Nietzsche to revise
Schiller’s distinction between naive and sentimental poetry and to coopt Hegel’s
observation that the epic yielded to lyric expression before these two modes were
synthesized in the age of tragedy. According to Nietzsche, only a romantic age
could have believed that the oneness of man and nature found in Homer—and
called naive by Schiller—was a simple condition that came into being naturally. It
could only have been produced by an Apolline culture founded on the suppression
of “an abysmal and terrifying world” by means of “recourse to the most forceful
and pleasurable illusions.” Yet if Nietzsche quibbles with the ontogeny of Homeric
culture’s naive splendor, he accepts this characterization of a culture that was in
turn overcome by the migration of the cult of Dionysus from the orient to Athens.
Then, with the “austere majesty” of Doric art, Apollo once again reasserted his
­supremacy. Finally, Attic tragedy contained these warring impulses in a mysterious
union.137 Thus, as in the Hegelian view of history, thesis generated antithesis until
it could be resolved in a short-lived synthesis.
Wagner had already outlined Nietzsche’s basic historical narrative in a note of
1849—“Birth from music: Aeschylus. Decadence—Euripides”—but Nietzsche
emphasizes that whereas all her “older sister arts . . . passed away calmly and beau-
tifully at a ripe old age,” tragedy died a violent death at the hands of Euripides.138
As Euripides watched Aeschylus in the theater, he revolted in his role as thinker
against the “discordant and incommensurable elements in Aeschylean tragedy.”
Only one contemporary shared his scruples: Socrates. The ancient biographical
evidence that links these two contemporaries is shaky at best, as Wilamowitz was

135 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1930) quoted (with revised translation) in Silk and Stern (1981)
130; also see Broth (1950). And on Nietzsche’s knowledge of idealist thought, much of which was
indirect, see Houlgate (1986); Martin (1996); and Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson (2005).
136 Henrichs (1986) 395–6. 137 Nietzsche (1967) 43, 47, 48.
138 Borchmeyer (1992) 330; on the academic orthodoxy of this view by the time Nietzsche was
writing, see Henrichs (1986) 373.
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32 What Was Tragedy?

prompt to object, but it suits Nietzsche’s purpose to make allies of them.139 With
the philosopher as his ideal spectator, Euripides began his great struggle against
tragedy.140 He set about to separate the “original and all-powerful Dionysian element
from tragedy, and to reconstruct tragedy purely on the basis of an un-Dionysian
art, morality, and world view.” In order to be effective, Euripides’ art required
“new stimulants”: “cool, paradoxical thoughts, replacing Apollinian contempla-
tion—and fiery affects, replacing Dionysian ecstasies.” Euripides “transferred the
entire world of sentiments, passions and experiences, hitherto present at every
festival performance as the invisible chorus on the spectators’ benches, into the
souls of his stage-heroes.” “Everything laid the ground for pathos, not for action:
and whatever was not directed toward pathos was considered objectionable.”141
Having rehearsed A. W. Schlegel’s indictment of Euripides, Nietzsche denies
him one of the few merits that August Wilhelm’s younger brother Friedrich
had conceded, his musicality.142 Euripides was in fact of such a “thoroughly
­unmusical nature,” says Nietzsche, that he eagerly embraced the innovations of
the New Dithyrambic poets, who transformed music into a virtuoso “imitative
counterfeit” of phenomena rather than the “immediate copy of the will itself ”
that Schopenhauer said music should be. Yet nowhere was the un-Dionysian
nature of Euripides’ plays more plain that in his dénouements, in which the hero,
like a “gladiator” who had “been nicely covered with wounds,” was occasionally
granted his freedom. Accepting Schelling’s contentions that it is inappropriate
for anything external to mitigate the bitterness of the hero’s fate and that any
“misfortune that gods as such can ameliorate through their mere intervention
is in and of itself not a genuinely tragic malady,” Nietzsche complains that
­Euripides substitutes the deus ex machina for the “metaphysical comfort” that is
proper to tragedy.143
Euripides and Socrates ushered in Alexandrian culture. The spread of this cul-
ture around the world was not just a decadent phase of Hellenic civilization, it was
the last great event of history, for the modern world remains enmeshed in its
nets.144 The “innermost modern content of this Socratic culture,” says Nietzsche,
is “the culture of the opera.” Nietzsche finds it incredible that the inventors of opera
could have believed that they had “solved the mystery of antique music” and
­recovered the power of ancient tragedy when they had no “sense of the Dionysian
depth of music” and instead valued “the understandable word-and-tone rhetoric of
the passions in the stile rappresentativo,” in which the composer set the poet’s text
over a continuo bass, striving after the sort of musically heightened speech that its
inventors believed had been “used by the ancient Greeks when introducing song

139 U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1872) 48–50; Irwin (1983); Henrichs (1986) 386–9.
140 Nietzsche (1967) 76, 81. Walter Kaufmann (1968) 164 remarks that “Since World II,
Nietzsche’s discussion of the death of tragedy has become more influential, and his ideas have become
almost a commonplace.” Kaufmann tries to show that they are “untenable” (163–6).
141 Nietzsche (1967) 81, 83, 80, 84.
142 On Nietzsche’s major debts to A. W. Schlegel, which are acknowledged handsomely in his lec-
tures but suppressed in The Birth of Tragedy, see Snell (1953) 120–1 and Henrichs (1986).
143 Nietzsche (1967) 107, 109; Schelling (1989) 89, 258. 144 Cf. Nietzsche (1990) 262.
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Our Tragic Culture 33

into the presentations of their tragedies and other fables.”145 Nietzsche is entirely
unconcerned with the scrupulous research that inspired these practical experiments.
Girolamo Mei’s conclusion that the Greeks wrote monodic rather than polyphonic
music has never been seriously undermined since he arrived at it in the 1580s, but
Nietzsche wants music to embody the will as thing-in-itself, so he is prepared to
declare that the polyphony of Palestrina, the counter-point of Bach, and the abso-
lute music of Beethoven—all praised by Wagner—are all more truly Dionysian.146
Because these Florentines were “unable to behold a vision,” says Nietzsche contemp-
tuously, they forced “the machinist and the decorative artist into [their] service.”
And because they could not “comprehend the true nature of the artist,” they
“conjure[d] up the ‘artistic primitive man’ to suit their taste, that is, the man who
sings and recites verses under the influence of passion.” The “metamorphosis of the
Aeschylean man into the cheerful Alexandrian” was thus repeated in the develop-
ment of modern music, which had become a slave to phenomena.147
When he first published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, Nietzsche believed that
Kant and Schopenhauer had put an end to this optimistic culture by using the
“paraphernalia of science itself, to point out the limits and relativity of knowledge
generally” and by proving illusory “the notion that we can fathom the innermost
essence of things with causality.” By doing so, they had ushered in “a tragic cul-
ture,” a culture that would take wisdom, not science, as its highest end, and that
would seek “to grasp, with sympathetic feelings of love, the eternal suffering as its
own.”148 He confidently expected such a culture to embrace the force of German
music, rising up from the Dionysian root of the German spirit. We are poised, he
enthused breathlessly, to “pass through the chief epochs of the Hellenic genius,
analogically in reverse order, and seem now . . . to be passing backward from the
Alexandrian age to the period of tragedy” in a “return to itself of the German spirit.”
Having returned “to the primitive source of its being,” Germany would be a bold,
free, and independent nation. It would “slay dragons, destroy vicious dwarfs, wake
Brünhilde”; not even “Wotan’s spear” could “stop its course!”149
In keeping with the critical tradition we have been tracing, Nietzsche identifies
a collision at the heart of tragedy that has to result in the death or suffering of the
hero if the metaphysical consolation of tragedy—a wisdom founded on suffering
and terror—is to be produced. He traces the malaise of modern culture back to a
historical moment when the tragic spirit was dissipated, and hopes, with Schiller
and Wagner, that a renewal of tragedy might galvanize the spirit of his people,
becoming at once a form of national expression and a means of national self-discovery.
And he reconfirms a canon of tragedy that should now sound familiar. Aeschylus
and Sophocles define the tragic spirit. Hamlet is a Dionysian man. And Wagner

145 Nietzsche (1967) 114–17; Giulio Caccini, Dedication to Euridice (1600), in Murata, ed.
(1998) 98.
146 On Mei, see Mei (1960); Palisca (1954) and (1985b) ch. 14; and Savage (2010) 2–4. For some
recent accounts of ancient Greek music, see West (1992); Mathiesen (1999); Murray and Wilson, eds.
(2004); and Hall (2006) ch. 10.
147 Nietzsche (1967) 114–17, 119. 148 Nietzsche (1967) 112.
149 Nietzsche (1967) 121, 142.
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34 What Was Tragedy?

promises to reintroduce the Dionysian man to Germany by overthrowing the

antithetical spirit of Euripidean drama and modern opera. Yet Nietzsche’s note-
books complicate this picture, for they make it clear that, even while he was writing
The Birth of Tragedy, he had private misgivings about Wagner’s place in this canon.
These grew as he wrote his public tribute to Wagner for the Bayreuth festival of
1876, and they came to a head in 1878 (at least according to Nietzsche’s account),
when Wagner sent him the libretto of Parsifal, thus revealing himself as “a rotten
despairing decadent, . . . helpless and broken, before the Christian cross.”150 They
received a full airing in The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1888–89).
Wagner was not another Aeschylus, as it turned out, but the heir of Euripides. Like
Euripides, he painted for effect, and his music could not stand on its own. It remained
tied to the stage, to the passions, to phenomena. Wagnerian drama was not tragedy
but idyllic opera, not a rebirth of the ancient spirit of gay pessimism but the cul-
mination of modern decadence. As such, it might clear the path for a Dionysian
artwork of the future, but only as the culmination of a phase through which
modern society had to pass. Once again, the spirit of tragedy was proving elusive
in the present.

DECADENCE AND PRIMITIVISM

Nietzsche was scarcely alone in perceiving similarities of tone and spirit between
the Alexandrian culture of Socrates and Euripides and that of his own day, but his
near contemporaries reacted to the perceived homologies in sharply opposed ways.
To some classicists and theatrical directors who accepted the “decadence” of
modern culture as a given, Euripides emerged as dramatist for modern times—a
poet of ideas (the “Greek Ibsen” and the “Attic Shaw”), a spokesman for the New
Woman (proclaimed in Medea’s “Women of Corinth” speech), a witness to the
brutality of war in Hecuba and the Trojan Women.151 Others, who accepted
Nietzsche’s diagnosis that modern man was sick and that he would become well
only when he accepted his impulses, lived once again in his body, and realized that
pain is the father of joy, looked to tragedy for a cure. But if tragedy was to be the
antidote to modern malaise, it must be primitive, irrational, instinctual, and ritu-
alistic. Beginning with the premise that tragedy was originally the “song or lament
of the goats” for the “death of the divine goat,” “later called the Passion of Dio-
nysus,” Sigmund Freud argued in Totem and Taboo (1912–13) that the divine goat
should be equated with the father who was dispatched by his sons in a primal act of
parricide—a founding deed of violence that tragedy commemorated (in distorted
form) with ambivalent feelings of joy and guilt.152 In this atmosphere, William

150 Nietzsche Contra Wagner in Nietzsche (1954) 676; but Borchmeyer (1992) points out that
Nietzsche knew a prose version of Parsifal as early as 1865.
151 Salter (1911) 9; Norwood (1921); Verrall, intro. to E. Munk (1981); Henrichs (1986) 396–7;
Hall and Macintosh (2005) 488–520.
152 The tragic hero assumed the guilt that really belonged to the chorus of brothers in order to relieve
them of it: “In remote reality it had actually been the members of the Chorus who caused the Hero’s
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Our Tragic Culture 35

Ridgeway, Jane Harrison, F. M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray, Albrecht Dietrich, and

Martin Nilson all argued in differing ways not only that Greek tragedy had a ritual
origin but that the techniques of anthropology and comparative religion could be
used to reconstruct that ritual basis and interpret even the most literary of dramas.153
For Murray, Dionysus was a Year Spirit who suffered, died, and was reborn. As the
dramatist who was “the clearest and most definite in his ritual forms,” Euripides
became a starting point for Murray, and his Bacchae, the only extant tragedy to
present Dionysus, appeared like “the old Sacer Ludus itself, scarcely changed at
all.”154 So, in an ironic turn, the last of the Greek tragedians became the most
­authentic witness to its primitive ritual form.
Even if the details of such myth and ritual accounts did not long withstand scru-
tiny, they made their influence felt far and wide—even unto the French classical
stage. The structuralist Roland Barthes claimed in the 1960s, for example, that
even if Freud’s etiology of tragedy was only a “romance,” it nevertheless distilled
“the whole of Racine’s theater.”155 Some performers such as the Viennese artist
Hermann Nitsch insisted, on the other hand, that the spirit of tragedy had to be
freed from its later theatrical refinements and returned to its roots:
The inner-most essence of tragedy was rooted in Nature’s attempt to respond to a col-
lective human urge to ventilate our instincts . . . and to rebel against the censorship of
our Super Ego, or at least to outwit it. When we push aside the intellectual and con-
scious control of our basic life-energies, we gain an insight into our subconscious,
unbridled, chaotic libido. And once these vital forces have been contacted, they break
free and rise to the surface, where they provide extreme satisfaction, ecstasy, joyful
cruelty, sado-masochistic reactions, and excess. In Greek mythology it was Dionysus
who provoked excess. He descended into animality and chaos, sacrificed himself and
was torn apart . . . . The Dionysian forces of the subconscious mind burst out into the
open, gain form and, to some extent, enter our consciousness. The result is psychic
cleansing (katharsis), which impacts on the spectators and their psyche.156
Nitsch sought to recover the essence of tragedy in his lamb-tearing actions. Dressed
as a High Priest, he would fasten a slaughtered lamb head down, then disembowel

suffering; now, however, they exhausted themselves with sympathy and regret and it was the Hero
himself who was responsible for his own sufferings. The crime which was thrown upon his shoul-
ders, presumptuousness and rebelliousness against a great authority, was precisely the crime for
which the members of the Chorus, the company of brothers, were responsible. Thus the tragic Hero
became, though it might be against his will, the redeemer of the Chorus” (Totem and Taboo in Freud
[1953–74] 13: 156). On Freud’s accounts of tragedy, see Alford (1992); Charles Segal (1994);
Winter (1999) ch. 2.
153 Arlen (1990); Ackerman (1991); William M. Calder III, ed. (1991); Kuklick (1991); Payne
(1978); Peters (2008).
154 Murray, “Excursus” in Jane Harrison (1912) 345. It has been argued that the virulence of
Nietzsche’s attack on Euripides prompted a reevaluation of the poet in Germany and England, with
Nietzsche’s friend Erwin Rhode, his erstwhile enemy U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and the
younger generation, including Gilbert Murray, Karl Reinhardt, and E. R. Dodds, contributing to his
rehabilitation. These men openly acknowledge the importance of the Bacchae to their conception of
tragedy—thus unveiling the Euripidean origins of Nietzsche’s own conception. See Henrichs (1986)
396–7.
155 Barthes (1972) 8.
156 Nitsch (1990) 15, translated and discussed in Berghaus (2005) 152–8.
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36 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 1.1. Orgies Mysteries Theater (Das Orgien Mysterien Theater), 6-Day Play (6‑Tage
Spiel ). Prinzendorf, 1998.
© Hermann Nitsch. Photo: Heinz Cibulka.

it and let the blood and viscera fall onto a white cloth. Innards would be placed on
the nude body of a human being, who would in turn be crucified (Fig. 1.1). The
carcasses of eviscerated animals would be beaten and hurled against the wall, and
then the actors would tear out lumps of flesh with their teeth and stomp on the
cadavers. Such eruptions of violence would be counterbalanced by signs of rever-
ence: The carcasses might be strewn with flowers or anointed with perfumes.
Schelling’s philosophy of the tragic—in which compulsion and death bear the
winter fruit of liberty—persists in transmuted form and through the mediation
of Freud in the thought of both Barthes and Nitsch. Barthes maintains that man
“becomes guilty in order to save God.” It is “man who atones for God. . . . Hence
man must cling to his transgression as his most precious belonging: and what surer
way of being guilty than making oneself responsible for what is outside oneself,
previous to oneself?”157 Nitsch reimagines the conflict between necessity and
freedom as a psychic struggle between the Super Ego and the Id in which the body
is a source of liberation rather than a hindrance to our moral freedom and in which
the cleansing of guilt may become the cement of community. Whatever their

157 Barthes (1972) 46.

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Our Tragic Culture 37

merits as theater, “abreactions” like Nitsch’s established expectations of tragedy that

could not be fulfilled by the vast majority of the early modern tragic repertoire,
which was bound to seem, by comparison, too distant from its ritual origins, too
dedicated to an ideal of imperilled civility, too committed to a theatrical style of
mimesis compatible with the “picture stage” rather than to an immersion in com-
munity that cut beneath the skin.

T H E P O S T - S T RU C T U R A L A S S AU LT O N
TRAGIC FREEDOM

By the 1960s, a range of scholars had become deeply suspicious of Freud’s claim to
have unveiled a necessary course of psychic development that was trans-historical
and cross-cultural and to have discovered a science (psychoanalysis) that could dis-
place tragedy as an art of recognition. One of the most influential of these was
Jean-Pierre Vernant. Looking to structural anthropology, historical psychology,
legal historiography, and comparative religion for methods that would enable him
to enter into the “architecture” of the ancient Greek mind, an alien subjectivity
that could not be properly understood apart from its social and cultural context,
Vernant once again approached the short life-span of Attic tragedy as a historical
problem. By the time Aristotle wrote the Poetics, Vernant claimed, “he no longer
understood tragic man who had, so to speak, become a stranger. Tragedy succeeded
epic and lyric and faded away as philosophy experienced its moment of triumph.”
For Vernant, as surely as Nietzsche, Socrates killed tragedy. But Vernant was not
content to observe that “tragedy [was] an expression of a torn consciousness.” He
enjoined that “we must seek to discover on what levels, in Greece, these tragic oppo-
sitions lie, of what they are composed and in what conditions they emerge.”158
Idealists such as Schiller and Schelling had located these tensions in the will. But
Vernant objected that just because we consider the will an essential dimension of
personhood, that did not mean that the Greeks recognized “an elaborated category
of the will.” Indeed, they lacked “any terminology to describe actions stemming
from it.”159 Bruno Snell had noticed the problem as early as 1928, but he had
­argued that the tragedies of Aeschylus were “full proof of the emergence within
Greek civilization of the individual as free agent.”160 André Rivier had countered
that “if there is any scope for the will” in the tragedies of Aeschylus, “it is certainly
not autonomous will in the Kantian, or even simply the Thomist, sense of the
term.”161 Vernant characteristically looks outside the theater for evidence of social
practice and linguistic forms that, as creations and creators of the Greek mind, may
shed light on this critical impasse. In the context of religious thought, he finds the
action of the criminal perceived, in the outside world, as a “daemonic power of
defilement” and within the perpetrator “as an error of the mind.” “Error, felt to be
158 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 25, 29.
159 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 60.
160 Snell (1953) 102–12; Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 52.
161 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 52.
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38 What Was Tragedy?

an assault on the religious order, contains a malignant power far greater than the
human agent.” The individual who commits it is himself a victim “caught up in the
sinister force that he has unleashed (or that exerts itself through him).” But “with
the advent of law and the institution of the city courts, the ancient religious
­conception of the misdeed fades away. A new idea of crime emerges. The role of
the individual becomes more clearly defined,” and “intention now appears as a
constitutive element of the criminal action.”162 We can now understand why Greek
tragedy was such a short-lived cultural formation. It could flourish only during the
moment of cultural transition when religious habits of thought were on the wane
but still possessed a measure of force and when legal concepts of responsibility were
current but not yet unassailable. “It is only for our modern selves that the problem
is posed in terms of a choice between free will on the one hand and constraint in
various forms on the other,” claims Vernant.163 In fact, human and divine caus-
ality, ēthos and daimōn, are intermingled but not confused in tragedy. They are
“contrary but indissociable aspects” of the “same actions.”164
Schelling’s freedom and necessity have been given a local habitation and Greek
names, and his sense of dynamic struggle and violent epiphany have been replaced
by the static language of structural relations, but there can be no doubt that Ver-
nant’s analysis of the will in Greek tragedy finds its distant origin in Schelling’s
Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism or that his analysis of competing regimes of
knowledge hearkens back to Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history. Yet the Greek
man who emerges from Vernant’s account of tragedy is noticeably diminished:
For the Greeks of the classical period, to act meant not so much to organize and dom-
inate time as to exclude oneself from it, to bypass it. Swept along in the current of life,
action turned out to be illusory, vain, and impotent without the help of the gods.
What it lacked was the power of realization, the efficacy that was the exclusive priv-
ilege of the divine. Tragedy expresses this weakness inherent in action, this internal
inadequacy of the agent, by showing the gods working behind men’s backs from
­beginning to end of the drama, to bring everything to its conclusion. Even when, by
exercising choice, he makes a decision, the hero almost always does the opposite of
what he thinks he is doing.165
Vernant’s tone is a far cry from Schelling’s triumphant appreciation of the ruined
hero’s “declaration of free will.”166 As Miriam Leonard has observed, Vernant seems
to insist on the discontinuity of the historical subject and the otherness of the
Greek mind only in order to make a “transhistorical statement about the limits of
agency and political subjectivity.”167

162 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 62–3. 163 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 75.
164 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 77. 165 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 83.
166 Schelling (1980) 193. If the hopes and disappointments of the French Revolution and German
national unification inform Schelling’s philosophy of the tragic, the civil unrest that erupted in Paris
in May 1968 amid the closure of the Sorbonne and nation-wide strikes, the struggle to decolonize
Algeria, and the “structuralist critique of subjectivity” that Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and other
contemporaries pioneered in these historical circumstances, have left their mark just as surely on
Vernant’s post-structural account of tragedy.
167 Leonard (2005) 37.
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Our Tragic Culture 39

Vernant found a kindred spirit in early modern studies in Stephen Greenblatt.

In his ground-breaking study Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Greenblatt returned
to the Renaissance as a historical moment in which, as Jacob Burckhardt and Jules
Michelet long ago maintained, identities began to be generated in new ways.
Greenblatt observes that this change was “not only complex but resolutely dialect-
ical. If we say that there is a new stress on the executive power of the will, we must
say that there is the most sustained and relentless assault upon the will.”168 Ranging
widely across the literature and culture of the English Renaissance, Greenblatt
identifies various sources of coercion that threaten to efface the self—from the
authority of scripture to the authority of the monarch. Yet that very threat can be
the occasion for a conscious declaration of self hood. It becomes obvious that
Greenblatt is asking questions of his material that the German idealists first asked
of tragedy when he comes to Christopher Marlowe. Maintaining that Lukács’ account
of tragic heroism (transmitted by way of Lucien Goldmann) can be applied to
Marlowe’s heroes, who “seem determined to realize the Idea of themselves as dra-
matic heroes,” Greenblatt concludes that in Marlowe “the will to play . . . courts
self-destruction in the interest of the anarchic discharge of its energy. This is play
on the brink of an abyss, absolute play.”169 Marlowe emerges as the prototype of the
modern intellectual confronted with the problem of self-authorization and self-
constitution in a godless world: “We who have lived after Nietzsche and Flaubert
may find it difficult to grasp how strong, how recklessly courageous Marlowe must
have been: to write as if the admonitory purpose of literature were a lie, to invent
fictions only to create and not to serve God or the state, to fashion lines that echo
in the void, that echo more powerfully because there is nothing but a void.”170 Yet
if Greenblatt seems to write with tragic joy in his analysis of Marlowe’s will to abso-
lute play in a Godless universe, he modulates into a minor key in his conclusion,
when he confesses that whenever he “focused sharply upon a moment of appar-
ently autonomous self-fashioning” in the course of his research, he found “not an
epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact.” Nevertheless, neither the
sixteenth-century Englishmen he writes about, nor he himself, can do without the
“illusion” that they are the “principal makers of their own identity,” for the alterna-
tive would be “to abandon the craving for freedom, and to let go of one’s stubborn
hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as a fiction, is to die.”171 This is
Kant’s second antinomy reiterated in a self-deprecating tone: we must assume our
freedom for the sake of our dignity, even though we know better. Like Vernant’s
analyses, Greenblatt’s thick descriptions of sixteenth-century culture confirm the
post-structuralist critique of subjectivity.172 Even though tragedy is not their cen-
tral object of analysis, they help to explain why the idealist philosophy of the

168 Greenblatt (1980) 1. 169 Greenblatt (1980) 216, 295 n. 42, 220.
170 Greenblatt (1980) 220–1. 171 Greenblatt (1980) 256–7.
172 Greenblatt (2010) returns to some of these issues, recasting the struggle between freedom and
necessity as one between Shakespearean autonomy and absolute limits. According to Greenblatt,
living life as if they are the authors of themselves proves elusive for Shakespeare’s characters, and
Shakespeare himself ultimately rejects the ideal of aesthetic autonomy for a true liberty that consists
“entirely in an active willingness to submit”; see 117, 120.
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40 What Was Tragedy?

tragic seems like common sense. We encounter its terms, its assumptions, and its
questions everywhere.
In the “Attempt at Self-Criticism” that Nietzsche prefaced to the The Birth of
Tragedy in 1886, he regretted trying “to express by means of Schopenhauerian and
Kantian formulas strange and new valuations that were basically at odds with
Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s spirit and taste.”173 Two years later, he declared his
work “offensively Hegelian.”174 Not every critic is so self-aware, but the experience
that Nietzsche describes—of falling back on old formulas that are unnecessary, of
sensing that one’s tone and spirit is new and yet smelling the cadaverous odor of
idealist formulas nonetheless—must have been a common one in the twentieth
century.

REASSESSING THE LEGACY OF IDEALISM

We seem to have arrived at a historical juncture that permits, even demands, that
we reflect critically on the cultural legacy of these formulas. Terence Cave blazed a
trail in Recognitions (1988), a magisterial study of one of the three parts of a com-
plex plot identified by Aristotle (anagnorisis), which, as it ranges from Homer to
Conrad, reveals how imbricated the Aristotelean and idealist traditions are in con-
temporary literary criticism. In a bid to reclaim tragedy for a socialist agenda, Terry
Eagleton has also exposed many of the assumptions of the idealist philosophy of
the tragic in Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003). In The Fall of Œdipus (Le
Tombeau D’Œdipe, 2012), William Marx has issued a call to reclaim Attic tragedy
from “the tragic,” an imposition, as he sees it, of the second century editors who
selected most of the surviving Attic tragedies for preservation and of German ideal-
ists who erected a sub-set of those texts as ideal tragedies; and in Sophocles and the
Language of Tragedy (2012), Simon Goldhill has demonstrated that any attempt to
encounter Sophocles directly at the level of the text must still reckon with the
layers of mediation interposed by German Idealism, layers that Joshua Billings has
recently exfoliated in Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy
(2014). Although I make grateful use of these studies (the most recent of which
were published after this book was complete in manuscript), my project differs. As
Cave observes, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mark a low-point in the
prestige of recognition as a literary concept. That’s why I place such emphasis on
pathos as the essence of early modern tragedy. Eagleton usefully questions why
works such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage
should be excluded from the tragic canon, but he can do little more than attest
that they seem tragic to him. Because I confine myself to a historical period with a
coherent poetics of tragedy, on the other hand, I can outline an alternative descrip-
tion of tragedy that, just as surely as the post-Kantian philosophy of the tragic,
rests on crucial assumptions, makes value judgments, and for its own cogent
reasons, would deny that Clarissa or Mother Courage was a tragedy. Rather than

173 Nietzsche (1967) 24. 174 Nietzsche (1969) 270–1.

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Our Tragic Culture 41

redefine tragedy in trans-historical terms, in other words, I aim to reconstruct

a horizon of expectations that flourished for two and a half centuries and that
­deserves to be acknowledged on its own terms and set in dialogue with rival ideas
that have existed in other historical moments. Goldhill attests to its present obscurity:
“The influence of German Idealist thinking is so pervasive and dominant that after
the 1820s, it is as if the eighteenth century (and earlier eras) no longer existed for
the vast majority of critics.”175
It might be objected, of course, that German idealist thinking is so pervasive
because it describes a modern Western human condition that is recognizably our
own: We are bound by death and unconsoled by a belief in God or a divinely sup-
ported political and social order. Even if the idealists were wrong to universalize
this condition and project it back onto the ancient Greeks, they were right to
describe modern existence in such terms. The early modern aesthetic of tragedy
that I seek to reconstruct could, in contrast, be said to be fatally undermined by
the outdated social conditions that gave rise to it. If it made suffering grand and
evoked the sympathy of audiences for its noble heroes, it may have been too ready
to reassure audiences that such suffering was part of a larger design and too
­uninterested, for modern tastes, in the sort of social action that nineteenth-century
melodramas could promote by depicting the suffering of dispossessed classes whose
hardship was deemed too ignoble for the tragic stage of the Ancien Régime.
­Examples of such melodramas include the 1828 grand opera The Dumb Girl of
Portici (La Muette de Portici) and the 1852 stage play The Lady of the Camelias (La
Dame aux Camelias), which Giuseppe Verdi used as the basis of La Traviata (1853).
Yet the idealist philosophy of the tragic has its own deficiencies. It is preoccupied
with an ideal of masculine autonomy, and although its idealization of a Stoic,
­anaesthetized response to suffering may appeal to critics traumatized by the atroci-
ties of the twentieth century, the passions of the womanish MacDuff, who bewails
his slaughtered children in Macbeth, may be just as worth attending to as Hamlet’s
resigned, “Let be” (Hamlet 5.2.224). However far the social and political condi-
tions of its genesis may seem to distance the early modern poetics of tragedy from
us, early modern tragedy’s highly developed theory of the passions, which recog-
nizes the co-involvement of the theatrical passions with cognition, moral habits,
and somatic responses, retains the potential to put modern audiences in tune with
their own psychic and affective experiences and to train them to think with their
emotions.176
How can we begin to conceptualize and experience early modern tragedies in
terms that would have been recognizable to their initial audiences? I suggest that we
give provisional assent to five propositions that may at first seem unnatural to us.
1. Great drama need not be the drama of a nation. The tragedies and operas
that we still read and listen to today were selected for preservation by romantic
philologists whose aim was to trace in the history of literary works the awakening
consciousness of national identity. They turned to history to validate what Schiller
175 Goldhill (2012) 8.
176 This paragraphs incorporates suggestions made by David Quint in correspondence.
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42 What Was Tragedy?

had pronounced as a conditional prophecy, “if we could witness the birth of our
own national theater, then we would truly become a nation.”177 Their aim was
clearly enunciated by Georg Gottfried Gervinus, who explained that a history of
German national literature ought to show how “the wise direction in which the
Greeks had led humanity, and toward which the Germans (in accordance with
their particular characteristics) had always been disposed, was taken up again by
these [Germans] with free consciousness.”178 To German philologists like Gervinus
and Wilhelm Scherer, who were writing at a time when the German-speaking peoples
were coalescing into a nation, it seemed natural to take the emergence of the nation
as the teleological principle that would permit them to perceive the cultural pro-
gress of their people. They were even tempted to conclude that with the emergence
of the nation, the task of literature might be done: Young men of a­ mbition should
enter politics, not letters.
Although the histories of England, France, and Italy did not permit such a neat
narrative of cultural realization in an emerging nation-state, the accounts of these
literatures written by H. A. Taine, Émile Legouis, Gustave Lanson, and Francesco
De Sanctis nevertheless seek to describe the unique literary genius of each people,
a genius determined by race, climate, epoch, and their native tongue. “What we
have to study, to delineate with precision, is the very foundation, the very soul of
our France, as it is manifest in surviving writing,” says Désiré Nisard in a manifesto
of 1840.179 Works that do not contribute to such historiographic projects are
omitted by many nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary historians. Thus in
his History of Italian Literature, De Sanctis skips over cinquecento tragedy because
his nationalist prejudices lead him to disenfranchise works written in a classical
literary tradition and produced by courts and learned academies as both alien to
Italy’s indigenous culture and incapable of revealing the people’s growing con-
sciousness of its shared identity. In his popular account of the Italian Renaissance,
John Addington Symonds makes the same omission. Only a national drama can
produce true tragedies, he says, and a national drama requires a people who have
been made conscious of their own capacities by a heroic struggle, a people who can
gather in a national capital (as the Italians of the Renaissance could not), and a
people who can behold themselves in the mirror of a public theater—conditions
met only in the Athens of Pericles and the London of Elizabeth I.180 We find a
version of this thesis developed at length in Alfred Harbage’s Shakespeare and the
Rival Traditions (1952), where he contrasts the “theatre of a nation” (which gath-
ered to watch Shakespeare at the Globe) with the “theatre of a coterie” (which
gathered to watch Marston at Blackfriars).181
We are no longer as likely to be misty-eyed about the Athens of Pericles or the
London of Elizabeth I, and, in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Commu-
nities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), our studies of
theater’s role in the constitution of national identity are now mostly motivated by

177 “Theater Considered as a Moral Institution” (1784) in Schiller (n.d.).

178 Qtd. in Jauss (1983) 6. 179 See Moison (1987) 67; and Pemble (2005) 50.
180 Symonds (1898) 2: 97–8. 181 Harbage (1952) 3–57.
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Our Tragic Culture 43

antipathy to, rather than admiration for, the nation-state as a form of political
­organization. But we continue to attach particular importance to drama that can
be associated with the emergence of national identity, as the titles of some recent
studies of Shakespeare suggest: Walter Cohen’s Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in
England and Spain (1985), Graham Holderness’ “What Ish My Nation? Shakespeare
and National Identities” (1991), Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood: The
Elizabethan Writing of England (1992), and Jeffrey Knapp’s Shakespeare’s Tribe:
Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2004). No fewer than four
chapters in the recent Cambridge History of Early Modern Literature (2003) are
­entitled, “Literature and National Identity,” while six of the fourteen chapters in
the new Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera (2009) are devoted to
“national styles and genres.”
Many early modern critics theorized that geography and climate affected the
humoral disposition, manners, and institutions of peoples, producing distinct the-
atrical traditions. They frequently contrasted the tastes of the ancients and moderns,
the English and French, the French and Italians. But no critics before Lessing in
the mid-eighteenth century demanded that tragic drama create the conscience of a
nation, and virtually all of them would have been surprised in the extreme to find
works being selected according to such a stringent criterion as this—a relic of
­romantic nationalism, yet still found in the fourth edition of A Short History of
Opera (2003), a standard authority: “ . . . a purely ‘German’ opera is one written for
performance by German artists for German audiences, with an original libretto in
the German language and on a German (or, at least, not a typically foreign) sub-
ject, and with music in a German (or, at least, not a typically foreign) style.”182 In
1773, in contrast, Gluck still considered it desirable “to produce a music fit for
all nations and to do away with the ridiculous differentiation between national
musical styles.”183
From 1550 to 1795, tragedies might be written in Latin, in vernacular lan-
guages like French or Italian that were foreign to their audiences, or even in a
macaronic form, with dialogue spoken in Latin and operatic interludes performed
in the vernacular. They were staged not just in public but in court theaters, Jesuit
colleges, and colonial missions. Their architects, scenographers, poets, composers,
musicians, singers, dancers, and actors often came from distant lands, sometimes
on loan from foreign courts. Needless to say, not all contemporaries approved of
the international quality of this theater. Some Protestants were suspicious of a style
of dramaturgy that they associated with Catholic Italy and France. Others objected
to any drama sung in a foreign tongue because it ravished its listeners with sound
rather than instructing them in sense. A handful even worried about the effect that
this international style of dramaturgy might have on their native drama, traditional
or nascent. But none of them displayed the same preoccupation with a national
identity based on language that we have inherited from the romantics.

182 Grout and Williams (2003) 121.

183 Gluck, Letter to the editor of the Mercure de France, Vienna, February 1, 1773, 182–4. Repro-
duced in Lesure (1984) 8–10. Translated in Howard (1995) 106–7.
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44 What Was Tragedy?

At a time when many would prefer to teach world literature rather than national
literatures, want to define literary ecosystems (such as “script worlds,” “borderlands,”
and the “circum-Atlantic”) that confound political jurisdictions, and hope to
theorize forms of global citizenship that can replace the patriotism of nation-states,
it should be easy to see this early modern international dramatic repertoire anew.
But old habits die hard.
2. Organic form is not superior to beautiful design. Romantic critics sought to
­ efine art, nature, and the innocence of childhood as realms of freedom that could
d
be arrayed in opposition to industrialization. They also defined genius as the mental
disposition through which nature gave the rule to art. They therefore sought to align
true art with the organic development that alone could result in living form and
false art with mechanical reproduction.184 The ideal of organic form was especially
useful to the romantics’ defense of Shakespearean dramaturgy because it ­licensed
them to disregard traditional canons of beauty, de-emphasize standards of judg-
ment predicated on the assumption that tragedy was, first and foremost, a species of
theater, and look instead for the properties of organic life: unity in multëity, the
capacity to assimilate, growth, organization, and the interdependence of parts.
Although the metaphor of organic form was attacked in the twentieth century
by some avant-garde theorists (the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, for in-
stance), it was still accepted by I. A. Richards and most of the New Critics when
they ­established the protocols of close reading that continue to be the professional
calling card of literary critics. “To conceive a poem as an organism,” Cleanth
Brooks says in a defense of William Empson’s style of close reading, “is indeed to
take the only approach from which to attack the problem of imaginative unity.”185
Poems, says I. A. Richards, “are living, feeling, knowing beings in their own right;
the so-called metaphor that treats a poem as organic is not a metaphor, but a literal
description. A poem is an activity, seeking to become itself.”186
What the romantics suppressed in their distinction between mechanic and ­organic
form was the renaissance ideal of disegno, or design—not a form of mechanical repro-
duction but a creative process in which the abiding essence and ideal relations of
things are distilled and given formal expression. In his preface to the Lives of
the Artists (Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori), Giorgio Vasari
declares grandly that design came into being when God shaped man from a clod
of earth.187 The Poetics’ comparison of the fable of a tragedy to a drawing was crucial
to the ideal of design: “if someone should smear the picture with the most beautiful
colors, but at random, he would not please us as much as if he gave us a simple
outline on a white ground” (Poetics 1450b1–4; trans. Else).188 This passage, which is
one of the bases for the theoretical primacy of disegno over colorito among Florentine
art theorists of the cinquecento, lies behind Michelangelo’s verdict on Titian’s

184 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 340; Coleridge (1969–) 5.1: 495.

185 Cleanth Brooks (1941) 37.    186 Richards (1963) 165.
187 Vasari (1927) 1: 1.
188 Else (1997) 259–61. Because I make use of several translations of the Poetics, I have indicated
translators’ names parenthetically throughout.
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Our Tragic Culture 45

Danaë: “If this man, said he, were aided by art and design as he is by Nature, espe-
cially in copying from life, he would not be surpassed, for he has ability and a
charming and vivacious style.” Vasari concurred, noting that “without design and a
study of selected ancient and modern works, skill is useless, and it is impossible
by mere drawing from life to impart the grace and perfection of Nature.”189 Design, as
Vasari defined it for posterity, was none “other than a visible expression and declar-
ation of our inner conception of that which others have imagined and given form to
in their idea.”190
His contemporary Vincenzo Danti made a similar point by distinguishing
­between representation and imitation, ritrarre and imitare: “By the term ritrarre,
I mean to make something exactly as another thing is seen to be; and by the term
imitare I similarly understand that it is to make a thing not only as another has
seen the thing to be (when that thing is imperfect) but to make it as it would have
been in order to be of complete perfection.” Danti proceeded to explain that he
understood “the difference between imitation and representation to be the diffe-
rence between poetry and history” that Aristotle draws in the Poetics: “the writing
of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than
the writing of history; for poetry tells us rather the universals, history the particu-
lars” (Poetics 1451b7–9; trans. Else).191
This Florentine ideal of disegno was injected into the early modern poetics of
tragedy when Alessandro Piccolomini used the verb disegnare in his translation of
the Poetics.192 The comparison was not neutral, as any reader who has been struck
by the reduplicated persons, parallel plots, and triangular intrigues of early modern
plays will attest: the ideal of disegno (which John Florio translated into English
as “a purpose, an intent, a desseigne, a draught, a modle, a plot, a picture, or a
pourtrait”) encouraged tragic poets to conceive of their fables in terms of symmet-
rical arrangements, ground plans, and geometric patterns and in the process to
shed the particulars of history for an artificial order.193 “As in Perspective, so in
Tragedy,” said Dryden, “there must be a point of sight in which all the lines ter-
minate: Otherwise the eye wanders, and the work is false.”194 Such mechanic beauties
were means of forsaking the order of nature for the order of art, of achieving “a
retrospective distillation of experience” that was preferable to an “unmediated
chronological sprawl”—a distillation that was all the more imperative in an age
when the symbolic cosmos of the ancient world and the middle ages had given way
to a universe of infinite space and indefinite duration.195 That dramatists did not
respect the three unities because of a naive theory of representational realism is

189 Vasari (1927) 4: 207. 190 Vasari (1960) 205.

191 Danti, Trattato (1567), trans. in Summers (1981) 279–82; also quoted together with Vasari in
Puttfarken (2005) 55, a study that more generally traces the movement of sixteenth-century theories
of tragedy back into painting as poesia. Also see Puttfarken (2000) 175–7.
192 Peacock (1993) 196.
193 Baxandall (1990) 206. More generally on the importance of the practical sciences of surveying,
architecture, and the like to dramatic design, see Turner (2006).
194 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 230.
195 Riggs (1975) 169.
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46 What Was Tragedy?

only underlined by the fact that the same poets who respected the unities in
­declaimed tragedies employed multiple settings and marvelous machine effects
when writing tragédies en machines, tragédies en musique, and operas because these
forms seemed to call for their own artificial orders.196
The mechanic beauties of the neoclassical stage were not, however, just a means
of making the recalcitrant facts of nature and history into a verisimilar form; they
were a means of making the spectacle of suffering enjoyable when it ought by all
rights to be painful. From 1550 to 1795, many explanations of tragic pleasure cir-
culated, but the one that did the most to promote a preference for mechanic form
had an impeccable classical pedigree.197 All imitations yield “a peculiar Pleasure,”
says Aristotle in an anonymous translation of 1705, “As we may see ev'ry day,
when we view Pictures: Some, Originals, as terrible Beasts, dead, or dying Men,
which we hardly dare look on, as they naturally are, or at least not without Fear,
and Horror, we behold very agreeably in Paintings, and we see them, with so
much the more Pleasure, as they resemble their Originals” (Poetics 1448b9–13).
Plutarch developed this point at greater length. “When we see a lizard or an ape
or the face of a Thersites in a picture,” he observes in How the Young Man Should
Study Poetry, “we are pleased with it and admire it, not as a beautiful thing, but as
a likeness.”198 Paintings of uncomely actions, such as Medea killing her children,
Orestes murdering his mother, or Ulysses counterfeiting madness, please us for
the same reason. Lodovico Ricchieri paraphrased this account as early as 1516,
and from that date onward a procession of critics borrowed their illustrations
from Plutarch.199 The mechanic beauties of neoclassical tragedy had an important
role to play in the theatrical experience of audiences: They set the order of art
against the order of nature, and they maintained the critical distinction between

196 When discussing the appropriate magnitude of a tragic fable, Galluzzi (1621) 256 underlines
that Greek practice was founded on custom and consent, not nature: “This, therefore, is the general
command of Aristotle, and of Averroës as he interprets Aristotle, about the natural end-point: it [the
command] points out that an end of this kind is accomplished by a certain calculation, and it cannot
be pointed out as by a finger but must be entirely entrusted to the judgment of the poets. It will be
their job so to arrange everything that, when the change of affairs into the opposing part has occurred,
everyone understands that none of those things are missing which would seem to be necessary for a
change of this kind. For it follows from this that an end must necessarily be imposed then, when the
observers of the plot can need no other thing for the completion of the action. But Aristotle teaches
that that is an artificial end of Tragedy which the nature of the thing does not impose on the Tragedy
but rather the water clock demands, which through the dripping of water used in this way to count
out the hours among the ancients just as we divide and apportion these same hours using sand. There-
fore, when the poets were exhibiting their plays in the theater, a certain period of time—that prescribed
by the water clock—was given, which they could not exceed and were obliged to fill up. And so this
is rightly said to be an artificial (that is, established by the art and command of men) end of Tragedies,
which was limited by the water clock, since they wished to measure the proper size, and as it were to
weigh out judgment, according to that measurement. To this time period of the ancients, so circum-
scribed through the water clock by the agreement of all, I would think—if it is permitted to me to
judge anything in this matter—that the common habit and shared custom at this period must have
corresponded: truly, so that that must be considered the appropriate size of fable which does not
shrink from common custom and does not disperse through tedium those who listen and become
exhausted with abundance.”
197 See Wasserman (1947). 198 Moralia 18A in Plutarch (1927).
199 Ricchieri (1516) 162.
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Our Tragic Culture 47

painful events and the artistic representation of painful events that was a precondition
to the experience of tragic pleasure.
3. Tragedy is a theatrical rather than a poetic art. Because idealist and romantic
critics stressed that spiritual conflict lay at the heart of tragedy and that the
spirit felt most at home in the word, they defined tragedy as a poetic art. Indeed,
many of them bitterly regretted the experience of seeing Shakespeare performed.
“Shakespeare’s whole method finds in the stage itself something unwieldy and
hostile,” says Goethe. “It would be only falsehood—and in no sense is this to his
dishonour—were we to say that the stage was a worthy field for his genius.”200
­According to Charles Lamb, the theater’s very ability to overmaster the senses was
a liability. When we read Shakespeare, we become Lear, he says, but when we “see
an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by
his daughters in a rainy night,” we simply feel pain and disgust. When we read
Othello, we, like Desdemona, see his visage in his mind. But when we behold a
black Moor on the stage, he says (assuming the racial prejudice of his day), we
“sink Othello’s mind in his colour” and are revolted by his caresses of a Venetian
lady. “What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious
of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements.”201
In his 1598 On Dramatic Poetry, and the Manner of Producing Scenic Fables
(Della poesia rappresentativa e del modo di rappresentare le favole sceniche), Angelo
Ingegneri writes of dramatic poetry in an entirely different spirit. Because every
play implies a performance in space and through time, he says, the poet should
imagine his story in those terms before he sets his pen to paper. He is responsible
for understanding the three ways that theater performances signify: through ­action,
or the words, expressions, gestures, and movements of the actors; music, or the melody
and rhythm of the singers and dancers; and apparatus, or the lines and colors of the
stage picture. He need not be an expert in all the arts of the stage, but he should
experience the process of theatrical production so that he can write dramatic poems
that will play to the strengths of the actors, musicians, and stage engineers (and
respect their limitations).202 In the mid-eighteenth century, Francesco Algarotti
affirmed both the poet’s priority as draftsman of the tragedy and his responsibility
for imagining how the color supplied by the performing arts should be employed
to realize his disegno:
It is therefore the poet’s duty, as chief engineer of the undertaking, to give directions
to the dancers, the machinests, the painters; nay, down even to those who are entrusted
with the care of the wardrobe and the dressing of the performers. The poet is to carry
in his mind a comprehensive view of the whole of the drama; because those parts
which are not the productions of his actuating pen ought to flow from the dictates of
his actuating judgment, which is to give being and movement to the whole.203

200 “Shakespeare ad infinitum” (“Shakespeare und kein Ende”) (1815) in Goethe (1921) 111.
201 “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage represen-
tation” (1811) in C. Lamb and M. Lamb (1903) 1: 107–8.
202 Ingegneri (1989 [1598]). Also see Migliarsi (2003) ch. 2.
203 Algarotti (1767) 10–11.
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48 What Was Tragedy?

Such a total theater could “display a lively image of the Grecian tragedy, in which,
architecture, poetry, music, dancing, and every kind of theatrical apparatus” united
“to create an illusion” of “resistless power over the human mind.”204 The anti-­
theatrical prejudice of early modern Puritans, Jansenists, and Jesuits was aroused
first and foremost by professional theater, not by the inherent conditions of all
theatrical performance.205
Although we might “see Macbeth as the most intensely inward of Shakespeare’s
plays, in which much of the action seems to take place in Macbeth’s head, or as a
projection of his fears and fantasies,” there is every reason to believe, as Stephen
Orgel suggests, that the play was accruing the intensely spectacular, diverting, and
masque-like qualities of Restoration productions even before it was published in
the First Folio (1623), and that for “early audiences . . . these elements were not
antithetical to psychological depth at all.”206 Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), written by
the abbé Pellegrin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, offers another suggestive example of
the compatibility that early moderns perceived between tragic depth and theatrical
display. In Act 4, scene 3, of this tragédie en musique, a descriptive symphony
­depicts the howling of the sea and winds as Neptune, in deference to Thésée’s
prayer, produces a monster from the sea. When Hippolyte tries to confront the
monster, he disappears amid the clouds engineered by a cloud machine. Grief-­
stricken, Aricie declares that she is dying, and the chorus let out a simple but
heartfelt lament for Hippolyte. Hearing the outburst, Phèdre approaches and
engages in a lyric dialogue with them. When they report that a furious monster has
killed Hippolyte, she admits in a monody that his blood is really on her hands. But
she soon finds the orchestra, figuring an eruption from hell or perhaps from within,
competing with her voice. Frozen with terror, she asks for a respite to reveal her
crime to Thésée. The chorus can only exclaim, “O vain regrets! Hippolytus is no
more [O remords superflus!/ Hippolyte n’est plus].” So Rameau brings the act to a
shattering conclusion.
Works such as Macbeth and Hippolyte et Aricie seemed to prove in practice what
the surviving accounts of the Hellenistic theater suggested in theory: that spec-
tacle, music, and dance could make a vital contribution to tragic catharsis. We
cannot understand most of the tragic drama or opera produced before 1790 unless
we take into account its assumption that the poet ought to realize his disegno
in performance.
4. The passions are dramatic units of crucial significance in early modern tragedy.
We are accustomed to analyzing dramas in terms of conflict and character, but this
is not a timeless protocol of interpretation. In the early modern period, critics
watched and listened for events to unfold, to be sure, but the significance that they
attached to events was chiefly affective. What’s more, the word character could not
even be applied to one of the persons of a drama until the late seventeenth century.
As we shall see in greater detail in chapter 2, early modern critics translated the
Greek ēthos via the Latin mores into terms such as manners, habits, customs, mœurs,
204 Algarotti (1767) 108–9. 205 See, for example, Barish (1981) and Zampelli (2006).
206 Orgel (2002) 166.
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Our Tragic Culture 49

and costumi. Following Horace’s The Art of Poetry (ll. 114–18, 153–78), they
­demanded that these be appropriate to the nationality, age, profession, and sex
of dramatis personae, but they did not look for the development of “character”
in our modern sense. When an early modern actor “personated” a role, he
adopted the manners appropriate to a man with a certain natural disposition
occupying a particular station in life, but he did not create a radically individuated
personality with a back-story as an actor might today; he gave somatic expression
to a sequence of passions. This is why Margaret Cavendish, writing in 1662,
praises Shakesepeare’s “persons” rather than his “characters” for their manners,
humors, and passions: “Shakespear did not want Wit, to Express to the Life all
Sorts of Persons, of what Quality, Profession, Degree, Breeding or Birth soever;
nor did he want Wit to Express the Divers, and Different Humours, or Natures,
or Several Passions of Mankind.”207 In the seventeenth century, a dramatis per-
sona acquired a “character” only if someone else on stage anatomized him in a
speech.208 And even when critics such as Dryden began using the word “char-
acters” on occasion to refer to dramatis personae, they applied the criteria of
distinctness and consistency—and therefore judged Ben Jonson, whom we usu-
ally consider a coiner of types, to be a greater master of characterization than
Shakespeare.209
Two ideas from classical literary criticism served to enhance the value attached
to depictions of the passions on the early modern tragic stage. In the first place,
critics distinguished history from poetry, for, according to readers such as Sir
William Davenant, the former concerned itself with action and the latter with
passion. Only a historian thinks it worthy to “record the truth of actions” or describe
“particular persons, as they are lifted, or levell’d by the force of Fate” in what
amounts to no more than a “selected Diary of Fortune,” he observes. “Wise poets
think it more worthy to seek out truth in the passions,” which hold the key to a
“general history of nature.” Portraitists who drew to the life were no more than
“Historians,” he said. Only by “assembling diverse figures in a larger volume” and
drawing “passions” could painters increase in dignity and become Poets.”210 In
plays, as James Drake explained in 1699, the persons should be neither “Universal”
nor “so Singular as to extend no farther than single Individuals. Characters of so
narrow a Compass wou’d be of very little use, or diversion, because they wou’d not
appear natural, the Originals being probably unknown to the greatest part, if not
the whole Audience. Nor cou’d any of the Audience find any thing to correct in
themselves by the Infirmity peculiar to a particular man expos’d.”211 To most early
modern critics, psychological idiosyncrasies were not master-strokes of portraiture;
they were slips into history. Quintilian’s association of ēthos with comedy and

207 Cavendish (1664) 245. 208 Womack (1986) 34.

209 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 239. For some useful a­ ttempts
to historicize the notion of character, see Womack (1986) ch. 2; Maus (1995); Lynch (1998); and
Orgel (2002) 7–13. I return to this subject in chapter 2, with more extensive bibliography.
210 Davenant (1650) 6–7. On the centrality of the passions to Dryden’s theory of dramaturgy, see
Mace (1962).
211 Drake, Antient and Modern Stages (1699), in Vickers, ed. (1974–81) 2: 97.
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50 What Was Tragedy?

pathos with tragedy only reinforced the idea that the manners of tragic personages
might be less important than their passions (Institutes 6.2.20).212
The universal quality of the passions encouraged the search for a rhetoric of
the passions that could govern all the arts by associating certain poetic meters,
rhetorical figures, facial expressions, gestures, tempos, and musical modes with
particular affective states.213 Descartes’ influential The Passions of the Soul (Les pas-
sions de l’ame, 1649), Charles Le Brun’s Method for Understanding How to Draw
the Passions (Methode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions, 1668, pub. 1698), and
Johann Mattheson’s proposals for expressing the affects in music in The Perfect
Music-master (Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 1739) are just a few of the best known
documents in this massive enterprise. Such attempts to establish rhetorics of the
passions depended on theories about the operation of the mind and the body that
underwent revolutionary changes between 1550 and 1795—from faculty psych-
ology and humoral physiology, through Cartesian mechanism, to Lockean theories
of the association of ideas and nerve physiology—but the passion remained an
integral unit of dramatic meaning until the late eighteenth century.
That character could be a unit of dramatic meaning—and indeed a fourth unity
more important than the rest—was one of the great critical discoveries of the mid-
eighteenth century, a discovery that had to await the publication of works such as
Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Hume’s A Treatise of
Human Nature (1739–40), Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), and Maurice Morgann’s
seminal work of Shakespearean criticism, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of
Sir John Falstaff (1777). It now made sense to write about characters as if they were
the record of a mind shaped in childhood, scarred by experience, and distinguished
by their own peculiar chains of remembrance and anticipation. The romantics’
emphasis on organic development and Bildung led them to demand that characters,
like living beings, should develop and find their own form. “Hamlet is not a person
whose nativity is cast, or whose death is foretold by portents,” says Hazlitt appre-
ciatively in 1826, “he weaves the web of his destiny out of his own thoughts . . . .”214
By conferring “intelligence and imagination” on his characters, says Hegel, Shake-
speare allows them to “contemplate themselves objectively” as works of art, thus
making them “free artists of themselves.”215
This new emphasis on character underlies A. W. Schlegel’s objection to the
acting manual that Lessing’s disciple and fellow playwright, Johann Jacob Engel,
published in 1785: “the grand error of the author is, that he considered it a
complete system of mimicry or imitation, though it only treats of the expression
of the passions, and does not contain a syllable on the subject of the exhibition of
character.”216 It echoes through Lamb’s contention that Shakespeare should not
be acted because “the form of speaking,” much like the letter writing of Clarissa,
“is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or
spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings

212 Gill (1984) 160. 213 Roach (1983) 58–92.

214 “Sir Walter Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare” (1826) in Hazlitt (1903) 7: 344.
215 Hegel (1920) 4: 337. 216 Schlegel (1846) 513.
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Our Tragic Culture 51

of mind in a character,” while “the glory of the scenic art is to personate the pas-
sions, and turns of passion,” and “the more coarse and palpable the passion” is,
“the more hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer” enjoys.217
And it can be heard in Hegel’s censure of French neoclassical tragedy for being
content to “excogitate characters that are little more than the formal imperson-
ations of general types and passions” rather than aiming “at giving us true and
living persons.”218
If we are to read tragedies written before the mid-eighteenth century on their
own terms, we must follow the passions rather than search in vain for spiritual
­development or radical individuation. Whether Shakespeare is an exception to this
generalization as the romantics insisted is a question to which I return in chapter 6.
5. Not only the naive but also the sophisticated and seemingly modern aspects of
a­ ncient theater have value. Idealist and romantic critics placed a high value on the
tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles because they appeared to be the simple poetic
expression of a nation that could still feel naturally. In his 1795–96 On Naive and
Sentimental Poetry (Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung), Schiller maintains
that we respond to nature, to children, and to the naive poetic expressions of
­humanity in its infancy in much the same way: “They are what we were; they are
what we ought to become once more. We were nature as they, and our culture
should lead us back to nature, upon the path of reason and freedom.” Whereas the
Greeks felt naturally and therefore had no need to develop a cult of nature, mod-
erns harbor a feeling for nature that resembles that of a sick man for health. But
the alteration from naive to sentimental feeling is not a recent change. It is “already
extremely striking in Euripides, if one compares the latter with his predecessors,
especially Aeschylus”; and it is exemplified by Horace, the poet of a corrupt and
cultivated age.219 The promise that the chorus holds for modern tragedy, Schiller
explains in his preface to The Bride of Messina (1803), is that it forces the poet to
“manipulate an alteration in the story he is treating in order to transpose it into
that childlike time and into that childlike form.” Whereas the Greeks found the
“chorus in nature,” the modern poet can use it to transform “the modern, vulgar
world into the ancient poetic one,” thus casting off those “artificial contrivances”
of modern society that hinder the revelation of man’s “inner nature” and “original
character.”220 More than half a century later, Wagner drew equally damaging com-
parisons between “the darksome cloud of modern modish culture” and the art of
the Greeks, the “fairest children” of “all-loving Nature.” Like Schiller, he regretted
“the damaging influence” that “the mawkish and sentimental school-master poetry
of Euripides” had exercised “on the modern drama up to Goethe and Schiller,” but
hoped that the “glorious outlines for the Art-work of the Future” might be found
in the spring-time of Greece, before either Sophocles or Pericles had begun to

217 “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” in C. Lamb and M. Lamb (1903) 1: 99.
218 Hegel (1920) 4: 274.
219 On Naive and Sentimental Poetry in Schiller (1995) 180–1, 193–6. Friedrich Schlegel advances
some similar views in a youthful essay discussed in Billings (2014) 107–13.
220 “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy” in Schiller (1962) 8.
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52 What Was Tragedy?

transform the drama and the polity.221 For generations of Europeans who wished
to flee from modern industrial and consumer society into a simpler and more
­innocent stage of human development, Euripides’ consciousness of internal dis-
cord held little attraction. It was all too familiar.
But from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, poets and audiences
did not feel impelled to distinguish between a lost age of noble simplicity and a
present age of moral decadence. When they reviewed the progress of ancient civ-
ilization, they did not dismiss all that looked familiar. They might conclude that
late authorities such as Horace were in an ideal position to select which aspects
of ancient civilization were worthiest of emulation. Moreover, they were likely to
see the evolving tastes of ancient audiences as part of a natural process of civiliza-
tion that could not easily be reversed, either in the ancient world or in the
modern. When they returned to the Greco-Roman world for inspiration, they
did not seek the natural world; they sought a lost civilization whose arts—which
had successfully imitated nature—might be recovered through research and prac-
tical experiment.
When that research concerned the performance of tragedy, it inevitably drew
them to the achievements of Hellenistic Greece and the Roman empire because
most of the surviving treatises on oratorical delivery, music, dance, stage ma-
chinery, and theater design postdated Cicero (106–44 bc). Even the fragmentary
evidence that they could collect from older authorities had usually been sifted and
preserved by later authors such as Athenaeus and Aulus Gellius, who interposed
their taste between Periclean Athens and the modern world. Thus, when Giovanni
Bardi searched the classics for descriptions of the sacred festivals of Delphi that
might be sufficiently detailed to recreate the Pythian Battle between Apollo and
Python, he settled on the late authorities Lucian and Julius Pollux. The result
was the magnificent third intermedio presented at the marriage of the Grand Duke
Ferdinand I to Christine of Lorraine, granddaughter of the French queen Catherine
de Medici, in 1589, written by the future opera librettist Ottavio Rinuccini, and
set to music by Luca Marenzio (Fig. 1.2).222 It is little wonder, then, that when
Cardinal Francesco Barberini commissioned Jean-Jacques Bouchard to write a
study of ancient theatrical performance and to produce tragedies in the ancient
manner, Bouchard ransacked the classics and wound up with notes that were heavy
with references to Hellenistic and patristic sources. The tragedy that he staged in
1640, taking care to deploy scenes, costumes, the gestures of the actors, and music
“in the ancient way,” was Seneca’s Troades.223 The performance practices of the
­Romans continued to be salient in the eighteenth century. When Gasparo Angiolini
published an explanation of his tragic pantomimes in Vienna in 1765, he appealed
to the accounts of ancient performance found in Lucian, Apuleius, and Sidonius
Apollinaris—who lived from ad 125 to ad 489.

221 The Art Work of the Future (1850) in R. Wagner (1895–99) 1: 89–90, 105; April 2, 1874 in
C. Wagner (1978) 1: 748.
222 See Warburg (1999) 372–86, which includes Bastiano de’Rossi’s description; Salow (1996).
223 Murata (1984) 132–3.
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Our Tragic Culture 53

Fig. 1.2. Agostino Carracci’s engraving of Bernardo Buontalenti’s design for the Third Inter-
medio of 1589. Florence, Italy. Bastiano de’ Rossi’s account summarizes the Pythian Battle
described by Julius Pollux: “First, Apollo looked round to see if the place was suitable for
battle, then, in the second part, he confronted the serpent, and in the third (in iambics) he
fought the battle. . . . The fourth, spondaic section represented the death of the serpent and
the victory of Apollo. In the fifth section, he danced a joyful dance, signifying victory.
Through the depredations of time, we have lost the ability to perform such things with the
musical modes of antiquity; the poet, however, . . . has presented it to the accompaniment of
our modern music, doing his utmost . . . to imitate and recreate the music of antiquity.”
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Given the recent interest of classicists in the later centuries of antiquity and the
afterlife of the classics, it should now be easier for us to encounter a tragic drama-
turgy that, with its hybridization of Attic and Roman forms developed centuries
apart, embodies a complex history of reception, appropriation, and adaptation.
But it still requires a conscious effort. As a first step, we could do worse than adopt
the attitude toward Euripides proposed by R. C. Jebb. For despite being steeped in
the values of Herder and Schlegel, Jebb could still imagine why the early moderns
might have valued an ancient who stood on the threshold of the old and new: “the
spectacle offered by Euripides is, in itself, less purely Hellenic; but, if we only
remember that, then we can enjoy without reserve the peculiar gift which his
genius has bequeathed to the modern world,—a blending of Hellenic light, though
that light is declining, with the incipient promise of Romance.”224
224 Jebb (1894) 250–1.
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54 What Was Tragedy?

A P P ROA C H I N G T H E WO R L D W E H AV E L O S T

In Plato’s Laws (669–70), an unnamed Athenian compares the laws of his constitu-
tion to an outline that will have to be conserved and emended if it is to be preserved.
A painter who wants to paint a figure of great beauty that will be enhanced, not
diminished, by the passage of years must, he explains, leave behind him students
who can repair the damage done by time and who can improve the figure when
they make technical discoveries unknown to the master. Otherwise, his immense
labor, his endless brushwork, will have only transitory results. The early modern
description of tragedy was like this outline, conserved, emended, and ­“improved”
for two and a half centuries by students who had attended the same academy
of design.
At our historical remove, it may be impossible to recover all the color and relief
that the painting once displayed, but after producing a sweeping outline of the
early modern poetics of tragedy in chapter 2, I restore a few sections of the canvas
by focusing on portions that are now particularly hard to decipher. In doing so,
I consciously dwell on the surface of the canvas. Whereas in this chapter I have
often engaged in what Paul Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” an inter-
pretive protocol that insists on hidden or repressed structures of meaning that
must be detected or exposed (Vernant and Greenblatt do not advertise their debts
to German Idealism), in the chapters that follow I make a concerted effort to
­attend to the “surface” of early modern theory and theatrical practice.225 I do so in
the belief that we stand to learn more from reconstructing the evident elements
of dramatic texts than we do in seeing through them to predictable ideological con-
clusions. In the case of early modern tragedy, surface reading entails attending to
the passions.
Because twentieth-century critics routinely distinguish between the tragic and
the merely pathetic, while early modern commentators identify the essence of tra-
gedy as pathos, in chapter 3 I outline the tangled theory of the “simple pathetic
tragedy.” Its classical exemplars include Sophocles’ Ajax, and its earliest revival is
Trissino’s Sofonisba (1515), the first regular tragedy of the Renaissance. From
Sofonisba, I follow two lines of descent, one lingering over the suffering of female
heroines such as Racine’s Bérénice (1670) and Gluck’s Alceste (1767, 1776), the
other dwelling on the pain of disabled and discarded warriors such as Milton’s
Samson (1671) and La Harpe’s Philoctète (1783). Produced by three different
national traditions over three centuries, these works go some way to demonstrating
that, for all the national tastes, literary quarrels, and passing fads that characterize
early modern theater, certain ingrained and widespread values and assumptions
make the period from 1515 to 1790 a meaningful time-section in the history of
tragic theater. Some of them (Sofonisba, Samson Agonistes) could be described as
products of the lamp rather than of a working theater. My attention to works like
these, which were never performed in their author’s lifetimes, is no accident, for

225 Ricoeur (1979). On surface reading more generally, see especially, Sontag (1966); Sedgewick
(2003); Best and Marcus (2009).
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Our Tragic Culture 55

I want to claim that, despite the evident differences between neoclassical tragedy
and opera—the former often written by a solitary humanist and read by a solitary
reader, the latter inevitably the result of collaboration among many artists and real-
ized only in performance—these traditions share deep assumptions about the nature
of tragedy. I give pride of place to the humanist tradition in chapter 3 so that
readers can compare it to the operatic in chapter 4.
Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno have persuaded us that the heroes of tragedies
and the personages of opera are divided by a historical and philosophical chasm:
Life to opera means death to tragedy. Such bold claims rest on assumptions that
often go unstated or undefended: that Euripidean drama is itself antithetical to
the true spirit of tragedy; that theatrical performance is tied to the very appear-
ances that must be dissolved before tragic insight can be generated; and that, while
tragedies must end badly, operas end happily. Once we remind ourselves of the
unassailable fact that the heroes of tragedy did sing in the Greek theater and enter-
tain the possibility that Euripides might in fact be the most tragic of poets, that the
representation of pathos might be his essential task, and that his musical and scenic
innovations might have been forms of theatrical progress, not decadence, then we
can begin to see that early modern opera is a brilliantly creative response to a subset
of Euripidean tragedies that idealists declassified as “escape melodramas.” The tra-
ditions I analyze in chapters 3 and 4 do not correspond to a strict divide between
the theater and the opera house: Librettists wrote simple pathetic tragedies about
Dido, Sophonisba, even Ajax for the opera house, and poets wrote complex tra-
gedies with happy endings to be declaimed, not sung. But Iphigenia among the
Taurians seemed made for opera.
The same wedge that critics have driven between tragedy and opera has split
tragedy from sacred drama, for Christian doctrine, according to many twentieth-
century critics, makes tragedy an impossibility. When they do concede the possibility
of a Christian tragedy, they usually stipulate that only Calvinism and Jansenism,
with their emphasis on the inexorable will of God and the depravity of man, can
furnish the metaphysical basis of a tragic vision. I therefore consider the counter-­
reformation tragedy of the Jesuits and their students in chapter 5. This repertoire
allows us to revisit the antinomy of freedom and necessity identified by idealist
critics, setting it on the theological foundation of the controversy over grace. It asks
us to reconsider whether tragedy need emerge from the spirit of music, as Nietzsche
insists. And it makes good on two claims made in this chapter: that we cannot
ask early modern theater to be the drama of a nation and that we must learn
to value the performing arts of Hellenistic and Roman antiquity if we are to
­encounter these plays with the same expectations that their original audiences
brought to them.
My hope is that by demonstrating how rewarding if at times unsettling it is to
approach a few kinds of early modern tragedy with the expectations that their first
audiences brought, I may persuade inquisitive readers, theater directors, and actors
to explore other parts of the repertoire that I leave unexamined in these pages.
Doing so will make works that have fallen out of our tradition available for histor-
ically informed performances that can conjure up the vision of tragedy that held
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56 What Was Tragedy?

early moderns, from Trissino to Gluck, spellbound. Then we shall not only be able
to rewrite a chapter in the history of human subjectivity, we shall be able to reim-
agine our own.
Yet our own idea of subjectivity is already bound up with a historical narrative
in which Shakespeare plays a starring role as a prophet—if not the creator—of
modern selfhood. His radical individuation of dramatis personae, his supreme
­indifference to moral system, his secularism, and the acuity with which he seems
to perceive the cracks of a society in transition—all these qualities recommend him
to us as a poet of modernity who has rightly overtaken the apologists for an Ancien
Régime (be it the Counter-Reformation or the Hapsburg Empire) that was con-
signed to history by the French Revolution. In chapter 6 I therefore consider two
aspects of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy that seemed remarkable to audiences from the
Restoration through the Romantic Age: that he takes history as he finds it, and that
he does not write according to line and rule. These traits are crucial to our sense
that he is “great at characterization” and to our conviction that he sees life in
its tragic aspect. But we should be wary of assuming too readily that history and
tragedy must necessarily share the same formal properties. By comparing Shake-
speare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7) to Dryden’s tragedy on the same subject,
All for Love: Or, The World Well Lost (1677), I reckon up the gains and losses of
writing like a “historian” versus writing like a “poet” who seeks to realize a quiddity
of life in a unified design.
The idealist principles that this book must call into question in order to recover
an earlier description of tragedy shape the underlying assumptions of a great many
literary critics about almost everything, from culture to psychology and from his-
tory to politics. Indeed, one of the reasons that historians such as Jacob Burckhardt
and his pupil Nietzsche embrace many of the assumptions of the account of tra-
gedy developed by Hegel and his contemporaries is that it resonates with their
pessimistic vision of history. When this tragic historical vision is in turn crossed
with the thesis that modernity is a record of irreversible disenchantment and secu-
larization, the result is the continental philosophy of history that drags so much
postmodern critical theory in its mournful wake. By re-opening the definitions of
tragedy and the tragic, we unsettle some of the most deeply ingrained metaphysical
postulates of cultural criticism. We can begin that process by returning to the early
modern poetics of tragedy.
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2
An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy

Although Aristotle is not the sole authority on whom the early modern poetics of
tragedy relies, his Poetics did provide an essential model for humanist literary
critics, supplying them with a common vocabulary, establishing a list of topics that
ought to be addressed, and dividing tragedy into six qualitative parts: fable, man-
ners, sentiments, diction, music, and the apparatus or decoration of the theater.
When discussing these parts and other topics that the Poetics put on the agenda,
early modern critics often used Aristotle’s terms as a scaffold on which to hang a
vast collection of ancient testimonies that elucidated, complicated, or contradicted
Aristotle. They sometimes confounded them with similar categories found in rhet-
orical theory. And they often stretched them to justify contemporary performance
practices or mores. Terence Cave is on firm ground when he claims that “virtually
all of the commentaries—let alone the treatises, which do not follow the text of the
Poetics point by point but integrate it into an eclectic argument—are inventive,
exploratory, even permissive in their dilation of Aristotle.”1 Yet the Poetics retained
a currency and injected a vital force into early modern criticism from the publica-
tion of Francesco Robortello’s commentary of 1548 through Charles Batteux’s
1771 The Four Poetics of Aristotle, Horace, Vida, and Despréaux, with Translations
and Remarks (Les Quatre Poëtiques: d’Aristote, d’Horace, de Vida, de Despréaux, avec
les traductions et des remarques); Pietro Metastasio’s 1773 Extract from Aristotle’s “Art
of Poetry” (Estratto dell’arte poetica d’Aristotile); Thomas Twining’s 1789 Aristotle’s
Treatise on Poetry, Translated: with Notes on the Translation, and on the Original; and
Two Dissertations, on Poetical, and Musical Imitation; and Henry James Pye’s 1791
A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle by Examples Taken Chiefly from the
Modern Poets.2 By the early nineteenth century, in stark contrast, Aristotle and
Horace had lost their authority as guides to tragedy, and even interpretations of the
Poetics such as Gottfried Hermann’s commentary of 1802 were inflected by recent
philosophical developments. Indeed, inspired by Schiller and Schelling, Herman
reinterpreted Aristotelean catharsis as the experience of tragic sublimity.3 In chap-
ters 3 through 6, I say more about the literary quarrels that set Ancients against
Moderns, guardians of declaimed tragedy against champions of opera, secularists
and moralists against exponents of sacred tragedy, and critics of Shakespeare against
his apologists. Here I focus on the common assumptions and shared terminology
of a poetics that began in cinquecento Italy, was elaborated in the Netherlands and

1 Cave (1988) 83. 2 See Weinberg (1961) 1: 349–796; Cave (1988) 55–143.
3 Cave (1988) chs. 5–6; Billings (2014) 100–4.
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58 What Was Tragedy?

France, and then infiltrated England and Spain more slowly and not without
­resistance. This poetics could vary by national and confessional context, but the
differences that I stress here are more often chronological. For although the early
modern poetics of tragedy persisted as a running conversation from 1550 to 1790,
themes made their entrances and exits, and seemingly stable terms were put to
new uses.

DEFINITIONS

In the early sixteenth century, definitions of tragedy relied heavily on the accounts
left by the fourth-century Roman grammarians Diomedes and Donatus. These
were synthesized by J. Badius Ascanius in an edition of Terence’s comedies pub-
lished in Lyons in 1502. As Ascanius describes the genres, they differ according to
the class of the persons represented, the historical basis of their fables, and the
emotional trajectory of their events:
Tragedy is a kind of play, written in meter, in which is chiefly shown the fragility of
human existence. For kings and princes, who at first consider themselves fortunate
and happy, are reduced to extreme misery at the end of tragedies. Comedy, however,
is a kind of play that presents the life of people of middle station, of fathers and sons
of families, and in which it is shown how they should live with each other . . . . Tragedy
often takes its subject from history, that is, from actual events, but some fictitious
elements may be mixed in; comedy, however, is composed of completely made-up
matter, but yet appearing true. The second difference can be this: Tragedy always con-
cerns the highest people and is written in high-sounding style; comedy, instead, concerns
those of middle station and is composed in middle style. The third is that tragedy is
joyful at the beginning, showing the pomp, the glory, and the grandeur of great and
noble men, but in the end is most woeful, presenting kings and princes reduced to
beggary and utmost despair and thus life as something from which to escape. Comedy,
however, is uncertain in its beginning and agitated in its middle, for all the characters
are deceived and perplexed at the same time. In the end, they all become reconciled.
Thus tragedy has a happy beginning and a sad ending. Comedy, on the other hand,
has an uncertain and quite sad beginning but a most happy ending.4
As we have already seen in chapter 1, one of the major achievements of the early
modern poetics of tragedy was to complicate this neat contrast of comedy and tra-
gedy in light of Aristotle’s Poetics and the corpus of surviving Attic tragedies, but
the process was an arduous one. Giovan Battista Giraldi, who would become the
leading tragedian in the court of Ferrara, and whose Hecatommithi (1565) fur-
nished the plots for Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Othello, reports that,
while at the University of Ferrara, he was asked to use the Poetics when comparing
a Greek tragedy to Seneca’s treatment of the same subject. But, without the com-
mentaries of Robortello and Vicenzo Maggi to guide him, he found Aristotle “so
obscure and full of so many shadows,” and he was so hindered by being unable

4 Badius, “Prainotamenta,” in Terence (1522) sig. A5r, trans. in Javitch (1998) 145.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 59

to read “the authors from whom [Aristotle] derives his authority and the examples
for confirmation of the orders and the laws that he imposes on would-be authors,”
that he found not just “the art that he teaches but the very definition that he gives
of tragedy” difficult to comprehend.5 That definition appears in chapter 6 of the
Poetics, where Aristotle defines tragedy in the following manner, as it appears in an
anonymous English translation of 1705 (based on Theodore Goulston’s Greek and
Latin text of 1623 and influenced by André Dacier’s French translation of 1692):
“Tragedy is then, an Imitation of an Action that is Grave, Entire, and hath a Just
Length; of which the Stile is agreeably relishing, but differently in all its parts; and
which without the assistance of Narration, by means of Compassion and Terror
perfectly refines in us, all sorts of Passions, and whatever else is like them” (Poetics
1449b24–28).6
The word rendered “Grave” here is spoudaias. Other early modern translators
sometimes prefer “illustrious,” “noble,” “heroic,” or “serious.” Because Aristotle ob-
serves in chapter 2 of the Poetics that the persons of epics and tragedies are spoudaioi,
whereas those of comedy are phauloi (below average, lowly, ignoble), his definition
was taken to confirm the emphasis of the Roman grammarians on the exalted status
of tragic persons. In his landmark translation of this passage in 1536, Alessandro de’
Pazzi distinguished between the humble persons (humiliores) of comedy and the
outstanding ones (praestantiores) of tragedy. Vincenzo Maggi commented in his
gloss that whereas comedy imitated “low types, fools, man servants, maid servants,
gallants,” tragedy imitated “kings and heroes,” and Giraldi concurred, contrasting
the “servants, parasites, prostitutes, cooks, pimps, soldiers” and plebian city folk of
comedy with the kings, heroes, and nobles of tragedy.7 Although some humanists
such as Gerardus Joannes Vossius insisted that spoudaias was better rendered “‘ser-
ious and grave,’ in which it differs from a comedy, which imitates trivial actions,”
the stage scenes that the Roman architect Vitruvius described in his The Ten Books
of Architecture reinforced a generic distinction premised on the rank or quality of the
persons.8 For Vitruvius reported that tragic scenes were “delineated with columns,
pediments, statues, and other objects suited to kings,” while comic scenes “exhibited
private dwellings, with balconies and views representing rows of windows, after the
manner of ordinary dwellings” (5.6.9). The illustrations of these scenes produced by
the renaissance architect and scenographer Sebastiano Serlio in the second book
of his General Rules of Architecture (Regole generali di architettura; 1545) added a tem-
poral dimension to the contrast, for by associating tragedy with the classical orders
(Fig. 2.1) and comedy with contemporary vernacular architecture (Fig. 2.2), they
suggested that tragedies should dramatize history, storied legend, and a grandeur
that was lost, while comedies should affirm the continuing vitality of life. The tro-
phies and obelisks of Serlio’s scene also established tragedy’s commitment to glory,

5 Giraldi (1543) 2. When no translator is indicated in parentheses or in the notes, translations are
my own.
6 Aristotle (1705) 69–70.
7 Maggi and Lombardi (1550) 64; Giraldi (1554) 215. For other cinquecento comments on this
passage, see Mastrocola (1998) 71–9.
8 Vossius (2010 [1647]) 1: 459. For a modern view, see Golden (1965).
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60 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 2.1. Sebastiano Serlio, tragic scene from Five Books of Architecture (De architectvra libri
qvinqve, quibus cuncta ferè architectonicae facultatis mysteria doctè, perspicuè). Venice, 1569.
Houghton Library, Harvard University f Typ 525.69.781.

duty, fame, and the masculine—hence its potential hostility to the private and fem-
inine values of love, family affection, and aggrieved remembrance.9
If tragedy was distinguished from comedy on the basis of the persons it intro-
duced and the events it represented, it was distinguished from epic only in matters
of form.10 Thus Socrates could say that Homer was the chief poet in tragedy (Plato,
Theaetetus 1: 152e) and Aristotle could remark that he deserved “the first place in
the Heroick, and Tragic kind,” for “truly his Margites has the same relation to

9 The scene descriptions in Serlio (1611) fols. 25–6 read: “This first [scene] shall be Comicall,
whereas the houses must be slight for Citizens, but specially there must not want a brawthell or bawdy
house, and a great Inne, and a Church. . . . Houses for Tragedies, must be made for great personages,
for that actions of love, strange adventures, and cruell murthers (as you reade in ancient and moderne
Tragedies) happen alwayes in the houses of great Lords, Dukes, Princes, and Kings. Therefore in such
cases you must make none but stately houses. . . . All that you make above the Roofe sticking out, as
Chimneyes, Towers, [Pyramids], [Obelisks], and other such like things or Images; you must make
them all of thin bords, cut out round, and well colloured. . . .”
10 On the distinctions between tragedy and epic in cinquecento theory, see Mastrocola (1998)
116–39.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 61

Fig. 2.2. Sebastiano Serlio, comic scene from Five Books of Architecture (De architectvra libri
qvinqve, quibus cuncta ferè architectonicae facultatis mysteria doctè, perspicuè). Venice, 1569.
Houghton Library, Harvard University f Typ 525.69.781.

Comedy, as his Ilias and Odysses have to Tragedy” (Poetics 1448b30–49a2). Epic
and tragedy had in common “a Discourse in Verse and an imitation of the Actions
of the greatest Persons,” but whereas epic employed “only one and the same sort of
Verse,” tragedy employed “Verse alone” in some parts and “Number and Harmony”
in others. Whereas epic was a “pure Narration,” tragedy was an “Imitation . . . made
by the Actors,” with the result that “the Decoration of Scenes” was “in some sort a
part of Tragedy, as well as the Melody and Discourse with which the Imitation
[was] made” (Poetics 1449b31–4). And whereas epic might encompass a great
scope of time, “Tragedy endeavour[ed], as much as is possible, to confine itself
to the Circuit of the Sun, to exceed it as little as may be” (Poetics 1449b9–15).11

11 Aristotle (1705) 55–6.

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62 What Was Tragedy?

This was the passage that gave rise to the early modern doctrine of tragedy’s
“artificial day.”12
A hiatus in the Greek text of the Poetics led all early modern translators to
­contrast the narrative form of epic with the pity and fear that effected catharsis.
In other words, rather than reading like Ingram Bywater’s modern translation, “in
a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, where-
with to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions,” they read something like our
anonymous translation of 1705, “and which without the assistance of Narration,
by means of Compassion and Terror perfectly refines in us, all sorts of Passions,
and whatever else is like them” (Poetics 1449b24–8). As we shall discover, the final
phrase (“all sorts of Passions, and whatever else is like them”) is not typical of early
modern translations, but two other aspects of the definition are and deserve to be
underlined. First, its contrast of epic narrative with pity and fear implies not only
that tragedy is cathartic in a way that epic is not but that the arts of performance
may account for the difference. This is the textual basis for Giovan Battista Strozzi
the Younger’s claim, made in an address to a Roman academy in 1594, that if tra-
gedy is better able to produce pleasure through the purgation of the passions than
epic is, the marvels of representation and spectacle, not the tragic poem, deserve
the credit.13 Second, whereas Bywater supplies the clarifying phrase “with inci-
dents” and Gerard Else inserts “through a course of events” into this sentence,
early modern commentators produce more compressed and literal translations.14
In 1548 and 1550, Francesco Robortello and Vicenzo Maggi both write, “not by
means of detailed exposition, rather by means of pity and terror purging such
­passions [non per enarrationem, per misericordiam verò atque terrorem perturba-
tiones huiusmodi purgans].”15 In his magisterial edition of 1560, which continued
to be used and admired by the likes of Jean Racine and André Dacier for the next
century and a half, Pietro Vettori writes, “and not by means of narration, but by
means of pity and fear preparing a purgation of such passions [& non per exposi-
tionem, sed per misericordiam & metum conficiens huiuscemodi perturbationum
purgationem].”16 These translations left open the possibility that the passion and
fear of the audience was aroused by something other than the incidents of the
play—say, by imitations of the passions.
At one point in his Metaphysics (1042a3–4), Aristotle draws together the main
points of what he has said thus far and then adds a telos, or end. Most early modern
commentators believed that he was doing something similar in his definition of
tragedy, summarizing some of the main points that he had made about tragedy in
chapters 1–6 of the Poetics and then adding an end, catharsis. But it was one thing
to recognize catharsis as the end of tragedy and another to explain how the

12 See Breitinger (1895); Ebner (1898); Springarn (1963) 56–63, 129–32, 184–5; Friedland
(1911); Bray (1963); Doran (1953); James E. Robinson (1959). For a valuable revisionist account that
supersedes these, see Riggs (1975). For recent accounts of the unities on the French stage, see Lyons
(1999) ch. 4; and Joseph Harris (2014) ch. 2.
13 Strozzi (1635); Weinberg (1961) 684–5. For Strozzi’s context, see Palisca (1968).
14 Bywater (1909) 17; Else (1967) 221.
15 Robortello (1548) 52; Maggi and Lombardi (1550) 96. 16 Vettori (1576) 54.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 63

“katharsis of such pathēmetōn” (sñm sËm soio�sxm pahglsxm jhaqrim) was

­effected. Should it be understood as a form of clarification, ritual purification, or
medical purgation? Did it temper the passions and reduce them to just measure, or
was it intended to extirpate them altogether? And when Aristotle referred to “such”
passions (soio�sxm), did he really mean “these” passions of pity and fear? Could
he have been thinking of “other” passions? Or (the interpretation that does least
violence to the Greek) did he mean to invoke classes of passions related to pity
and fear?17
Answering these questions in detail led critics to a wide range of conclusions.
Pierre Corneille, who expressed the suspicion that catharsis was just “a beautiful
idea” that Aristotle dreamed up to refute Plato’s condemnation of the theater,
­reported with a certain grim satisfaction that Paulo Beni could not supply his own
interpretation in a commentary of 1613 until he had dispensed with twelve to
fifteen rival opinions.18 Rather than document the emergence of all these—a task
that Baxter Hathaway and Bernard Weinberg have admirably performed—I want
to focus on two major classes of interpretation that would prove especially conse-
quential in the longue durée.19
One placed weight on the Nichomachean Ethics’ description of the way ethical
habits of feeling are formed, on the Rhetoric’s assertion that our passionate reac-
tions stem from ethical judgments, and on the Politics’ observation that the tunes
of Olympus move passions in the ethical part of the soul. The other pursued the
consequences of the analogy that the Politics draws between the psychic catharsis
experienced by participants in the sacred festivals who listen to the enthusiastic
music of the aulos and the corporal catharsis that Greek physicians practiced when
trying to cure their patients.
To understand the first tradition, we should start with Aristotle’s description of
the way music can imitate and move the passions:
And moreover, everybody when listening to imitations is thrown into a corresponding
state of feeling, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves. And since it is the
case that music is one of the things that give pleasure, and that virtue has to do with
feeling delight and love and hatred rightly, there is obviously nothing that it is more
needful to learn and become habituated to than to judge correctly and to delight in
virtuous characters and noble actions; but rhythms and melodies contain representa-
tions of anger and mildness, and also of courage and temperance and all their oppos-
ites and the other moral qualities, that most closely correspond to the true natures of
these qualities (and this is clear from the facts of what occurs—when we listen to such
representations we change in our soul); and habituation in feeling pain and delight
at representations of reality is close to feeling them towards actual reality. (Politics
8.5.1340a)20

17 To my knowledge, there is no thought in the early modern period that pahglsxm might refer
to “painful or fatal acts” rather than passions, as Else (1967) 221–32 suggests. Belfiore (1992) 269–72
offers a good account of competing interpretations of “such.”
18 Discours de la tragédie (1660) in Corneille (1984) 1: 69, 67.
19 Hathaway (1962) 205–300; Weinberg (1961); see “Purgation” in the index. For catharsis in
French literary criticism, see esp. Forestier (2003) 122–59.
20 This and all subsequent translations of the Politics are from Aristotle (1944), trans. Rackham.
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64 What Was Tragedy?

To be virtuous in Aristotle’s sense is to know what the true nature of the passions
is, to understand what sorts of persons and events are in theory worthy of par-
ticular responses, to judge specific cases rightly, and to feel an appropriate affective
response as a matter of habit. Robortello explains that for Aristotle virtue means
“learning rightly to be joyful, to love, to hate; and there is nothing that men must
need be more exercised in than in becoming accustomed to judge rightly and to
enjoy gentle and sound morals and praiseworthy actions.” By using rhythms and
melodies, Robortello proceeds, tragedians present “similitudes” that give “access to
the true nature of wrath, of gentleness, of fortitude, and temperance.”21 If this was
the effect to which Aristotle was referring, then catharsis was probably not accom-
plished purely by means of the plot, as some twentieth-century critics insist, but by
means of imitations of the passions as well: Audiences experienced a catharsis
when, after watching the events, manners, and passions of the tragedy unfold, their
judgment was honed and their emotional disposition purified.22
In our own day, Leon Golden, Martha Nussbaum, and Stephen Halliwell have
advanced positions that bear a resemblance to this early modern line of interpret-
ation: Golden reads the catharsis clause in light of Aristotle’s earlier discussion of
learning and explains it as a form of intellectual clarification; Nussbaum, building
on Golden, extends the clarification to our affects; and Halliwell remarks, “kathar-
sis may after all be in some cases compatible with the process which Aristotle char-
acterises in Politics 8 as a matter of habituation in feeling the emotions in the right
way and toward the right objects.”23 Daniel Heinsius was among the first to single
out this theory from the array that Robortello entertained and to give it preference.
Aristotle holds that a certain habitus can make a man wise (explains Heinsius in his
typically incisive style); that such a habitus is a form of virtue that springs from the
passions and that can be produced by “representation in tragedy”; and “that just as
anyone who from long practice has readied himself for performance, properly exe-
cutes a given art, so by a certain conditioning to the objects by which the passions
of the soul are stimulated, their mean is induced.”24 Heinsius’ comparison of

21 Robortello (1548) 53.

22 For the argument that catharsis is accomplished through the plot alone, see, for example, Else
(1967) 230; Belfiore (1992) 57–9, 132–4, 160–70, 348–50.
23 See Golden (1962) and (1976). Nussbaum (1986) 390–1 argues, “We can ascribe to Aristotle a
more generous view of the ways in which we come to know ourselves. First of all, clarification, for him,
can certainly take place through emotional responses, as the definition [of tragedy] states. . . . We
know . . . that for Aristotle appropriate responses are intrinsically valuable parts of good character and
can, like good intellectual responses, help to constitute the refined ‘perception’ which is the best sort
of human judgment. We could say, then, that the pity and fear are not just tools of a clarification that
is in and of the intellect alone; to respond in these ways is itself valuable, and a piece of clarification
concerning who we are. It is a recognition of practical values, and therefore of ourselves, that is no less
important than the recognition and perceptions of intellect. . . . With these observations in place, we
might try to summarize our results by saying on Aristotle’s behalf that the function of a tragedy is to
accomplish, through pity and fear, a clarification (or illumination) concerning experiences of the piti-
able and fearful kind.” Nuttall (1996) 12–15 takes Nussbaum to task for this interpretation, but I find
his own account of catharsis as a medical extirpation of passions unconvincing for all the reasons pro-
duced by the early modern commentators reviewed in this chapter and chapter 5. For Halliwell’s
­remarks, see Halliwell (1998) 196.
24 Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 12.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 65

watching tragedies to practicing an art is revealing because it suggests that, rather

than aspiring to theorize, tragedy is akin to that ancient tradition of philosophy
committed to the art or craft of living well; it suggests that it is an exercise or
a medicine for the soul.25 “This is what the things exhibited in the theater must
answer to,” says Heinsius, “because it is a kind of training hall of the passions
which (since they are not only useful in life but necessary) must there be readied
and perfected.”26 We shall see in chapter 5 that this account of catharsis was pro-
moted by the Jesuits and amplified in especially persuasive terms by René Rapin in
1674. Its details could vary depending on whether expositors assumed that pity and
fear acted on themselves (as Robortello and Heinsius do), that they were reduced
in order to make room for more useful passions and virtues (as Maggi suggests), or
that they acted on specific groups of passions that were related to pity and fear (as
Rapin prefers).
Those who advanced the second line of interpretation did not deny that the pas-
sions depended on judgments or that tragedy might inculcate virtuous affective
habits. They simply insisted that Aristotle had said that music had several ends—
purgation, teaching, rest from the vexations and troubles of life, and the amuse-
ment of the spirit of the man of understanding—and that it was wrong to confuse
these ends. These critics placed weight on a later passage in the Politics in which,
shortly after he frustratingly says that he will not explain catharsis because he has
discussed it explicitly in his treatise on poetry, Aristotle says that some persons are
very liable to pity and fear and religious excitement and that “under the influence
of sacred music we see these people, when they use tunes that violently arouse the
soul, being thrown into a state as if they had received medicinal treatment and
taken a purge” (8.7.1342a). This result seemed to be distinct from the educative
effect of music. The key to understanding it, suggested the second line of inter-
preters, lay in the proper interpretation of Aristotle’s medical analogy, which
seemed “to pertain to the body and the body’s humors.”27
Lorenzo Giacomini pursued this line of inquiry more doggedly than anyone
before the nineteenth century. In 1586, about a decade after translating the Poetics
into Italian, he delivered an address entitled On the Purgation of Tragedy (Sopra la
purgazione della tragedia) to the Florentine Alterati, an academy whose members
included most of the poets and composers whose theoretical writings and practical
experiments eventuated in the stile rappresentativo, the style of recitative and song
employed in the first operas.28 Giacomini argued that although some Greek phys-
icians believed in allopathic cures, or the treatments of diseases by their opposites,
catharsis referred to the use of homeopathic substances that drew off humors “not
as an enemy of the humor but as a friend and ally.” When diffused in the body,
rhubarb, aloe, or black hellebore could attract the choleric, phlegmatic, or melan-
cholic humors by dint of their natural virtues, much as a “loadstone attracts iron
and amber straw.” Aristotle’s notion of catharsis must bear some resemblance to

25 See Roochnik (1996); Foucault (1997); Sellars (2003) and (2007).

26 Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 12. 27 Giacomini (1972 [1586]) 3: 354.
28 Palisca (1968).
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66 What Was Tragedy?

this process. The natural sympathy existing between humans meant that when
a player displayed passions on stage, the sight and sound agitated the souls of
the audience and attracted answering emotions, drawing them out, purifying
them, and, in short, curing them. When one felt sorrow, explained Giacomini,
the vital spirits evaporated and rose to the head, where they stimulated the fancy
before condensing. The body naturally sought to remove “the bad disposition
that afflicts the sensitive part of the soul, contracting it and weighing it down,
and especially the heart, which, full of spirits and heat, suffers most.” Moving
to liberate itself from anguish, the heart set in motion the processes that resulted in
tears and l­aments. After this discharge, the soul remained free and unburdened
for some time.29
Many accounts of tragic catharsis attempted to synthesize these lines of inter-
pretation, but from a dramaturgical standpoint they had slightly different, though
not incompatible, implications. The expectation that catharsis should be instructive
promoted the arrangement of events, persons, and passions into pairs that invited
the viewer to discriminate, say, between justified and unjustified violence, or right-
eous indignation and irrational fury. It also promoted the presentation of passions
in triptychs that displayed a mean and its extremes.
The medical interpretation encouraged poets to bring their patients in the audi-
ence to a crisis that would bring relief. How closely Giacomini equated catharsis
with the release afforded by tears is suggested by the approval with which he quotes
Giovanni Della Casa’s remark that “men often have as much need of tears as they
have of laughter. [My neighbor] used to say that this was why the grim plays,
which were called tragedies, were first compiled, and the purpose of them when
they were recited in the theaters, as was done in those days, was to move to tears all
those who felt the need of them. In this way, by weeping, they were cured of their
disorders.”30 The text of Attic tragedies lends some support for such an idea. For
the chorus of Euripides’ Suppliant Women sing,
Insatiable pleasure in tears, unstinting labor,
brings forth my utterance,
like some stream of water pouring
from a steep cliff
in never-ceasing flow! (ll. 78–82)31
Many early modern poets and composers shared Giacomini’s assumption, in any
event, that tears, sighs, and groans played an integral role in tragic purgation.
Giulio Caccini, a pioneer of dramma per musica, considered a melodic leap down-
ward sung with the decreasing intensity of esclamazione one of the “principal
means of the moving the affections” precisely because it was a musical sigh, an
expression of the melancholy anguish of a soul.32 Both dramatic texts and the
stage directions of seventeenth-century prompters’ books are filled with references
to tears and weeping for the same reason: The release they promised had to be

29 Giacomini (1972 [1586]) 3: 354–9. 30 Giacomini (1972 [1586]) 3: 362–3.

31 Euripides (1994–2003), trans. Kovacs.
32 Caccini, preface to Le nuove musiche (1602) in Solerti (1904) 1: 63–4; Hanning (1980) 30.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 67

displayed on stage before it could be shared by the audience.33 When the central
lament of Arianna (1608) filled the theater with tears, Claudio Monteverdi was
hailed as a composer who had recovered the power of ancient music, and when
Iphigénie (1674) met the same reception, Racine felt his efforts had been justified:
“My audiences have been moved by the same things that brought tears to the eyes
of the most civilized people in Greece, and caused it to be said that among the
poets Euripides was most tragic, tragikotatos, in other words that he was wonder-
fully adept in arousing compassion and terror, which are the true effects of
tragedy.”34 The numerous descriptions of purgation by fire and water that Paolo
Beni gleaned from classical sources could support a view of catharsis that was even
more ravaging in effect. In the most colorful of these, Hermes Trismegistus said
that God purged the earth by means of floods, fires, epidemics, and cataclysms
(De mundo 7.1). Beni suggested that tragic purgation might be a similar form of
destructive purification.35
Faced with the obvious difficulty and obscurity of Aristotle’s notion of catharsis,
a small but steady stream of critics expressed their skepticism. In his Poetics of
1561, J. C. Scaliger refused to include catharsis in his definition of tragedy, saying
the concept was “too restrictive” and that “not every subject produces this effect.”36
Castelvetro conceded that Aristotle needed to introduce such a concept “so that
others would not believe, on the authority of Plato, that by writing on the con-
struction of tragedies he was constituting an art that would harm the citizenry and
would corrupt their good manners,” but he confessed his doubts that tragedy really
functioned on the citizenry as Aristotle claimed.37 In the late seventeenth century,
Corneille’s champion Saint-Évremond opined, “if we consider the usual Impres-
sions, which Tragedy made at Athens in the Minds of the Spectators, we may safely
affirm, that Plato was more in the right, who prohibited the Use of them, than
Aristotle who recommended them.” Like Castelvetro, Saint-Évremond assumed
that Aristotle needed a notion of catharsis in order to avoid Plato’s conclusion. But
no one, including Aristotle himself, had ever been able to grasp the idea fully, he
said: “For, can any thing be so ridiculous as to Form a Science, which will infallibly
discompose our Minds, only to set up another, which does not certainly pretend
to cure us? Or to raise a Perturbation in our Souls for no other end, than to
endeavour afterwards to calm it, by obliging it to reflect upon the dejected Condi-
tion it has been in?” Among a thousand people in the theater, said Saint-Évremond,
there might be six philosophers capable of regaining their tranquility by means of
these meditations, but the remainder will simply learn the habit of feeling “these
unhappy Motions.”38 In a letter to his fellow encyclopedist Jean le Rond d’Alembert,
arguing that the formation of a theater in Geneva would corrupt the citizenry of
the republic, Jean Jacques Rousseau made the same case: “I am not ignorant that
the poetic art, so far as it regards the theatre, pretends to a contrary effect; and to

33 Barnett (1987) 38–42.

34 Marco Gagliano, preface to La Dafne (1608) in Solerti (1904) 2: 69; Racine (1989) 699.
35 Beni (1613) 194–212. 36 Scaliger (1561) bk. 2, ch. 7, 12.
37 Castelvetro (1978–79 [1570, 1576]) 1: 160.
38 Of Ancient and Modern Tragedy in Saint-Évremond (1714) 2: 16–18.
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68 What Was Tragedy?

purge while it excites the passions: but I have great difficulty to understand this
rule.” The pain and pity that we feel during a play continue some time after it is
over, and any pain they occasion is not enough to efface the joy they produce. By
frequent repetition, said Rousseau, these lively impressions grow habitual.39
Whether they believed in tragic catharsis, criticized tragedy for making audiences
addicted to feeling, or were blithely unconcerned with tragedy’s ethical effects,
early modern critics agreed that it aroused violent emotions. They did not assert
that tragedy revealed the fundamental condition or paradoxes of human existence;
they did not claim that it had the final word on life; they did not say that it pre-
sented life without illusion. They treated it as a species of performance that could
not be defined without thought to its formal characteristics, yet whose form had
evolved from its dim origins in spontaneous performances, when it may have been
undifferentiated from comedy (for Athenaeus and the Etymologicum Magnum both
observed that the word “tragedy” might have come from the Greek sq�cg, or time
of vintage, and been applied to comic performances too); through a period when,
as Aristotle saw it, tragedy became a fixed form, having acquired all that was proper
for it; to the late Roman era, when a tragedy might be a historical drama, a repre-
sentation of a mythic fable in verse, or even a pantomime ballet.40
The efforts of commentators to shed light on the historical development of tra-
gedy had three effects on their definitions of the genre. First, it led many of them
to prefer minimalist definitions to Aristotle’s more circumstantial one, which they
found historically and culturally restrictive. Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Theo-
phrastus, supplied them with one: “Tragedy is an encompassing of heroic fortune
in adverse circumstances.”41 After quoting Aristotle’s definition, Scaliger offered
his own, closer to Theophrastus’: “I do not wish to attack [Aristotle’s] definition
other than adding my own: A tragedy is an imitation of the adversity of a distin-
guished man; it employs the form of action, presents a disastrous dénouement, and
is expressed in impressive metrical language. Though Aristotle adds harmony and
song, they are not, as the philosophers say, of the essence of tragedy; its only essen-
tial is acting.”42 After faulting Scaliger’s definition, the Jesuit Alessandro Donati
offered his own, which reasserted the role of the performing arts: “Tragedy is an
imitation of a perfect and great action of illustrious personages exhibiting meter,
and music, and dance separately; and through wretched and terrible mischiefs
tempering the affections of pity and fear.”43 Vossius preferred, like Scaliger, to shed
music and dance as essential elements: “Tragedy is a dramatic poem, representing
in serious and solemn language an illustrious but unhappy fortune. If so desired
one can add the end: to stir up affects and purge the mind of them.”44
The authors of such definitions were often engaged not in an exclusive analysis
of tragedy but in the elaboration of more comprehensive poetics that could not

39 Rousseau (1759) 18–19. On this letter, see Politzer (1955); Barber (1978); Barish (1981) ch. 9;
Block (1981); Marshall (1986b); Eisenberg (2000); Costelloe (2003).
40 Vossius (2010 [1647]) 1: 453. On cinquecento accounts of tragedy’s origins from a “primal soup”
of spontaneous song and its evolution through Roman times, see esp. Haugen (2011).
41 Diomedes (1855–80) 1: 487. Also see McMahon (1917) and (1929).
42 Scaliger (1905) 40. 43 Donati (1633) 106. 44 Vossius (2010 [1647]) 1: 457.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 69

only apply to both Greek and Roman literature but support modern versions of
ancient genres.45 As a consequence their early modern readers would have encoun-
tered tragedy as part of a larger generic universe that might portray life in its many
facets when taken as a whole, but when taken in part could not. Such an approach
discouraged any suggestion that tragedy promised a truer vision of life than other
genres. If tragedy enjoyed a pre-eminence among literary kinds, it was because it
represented persons and events that were superior, noble, heroic, and serious while
deploying a wider range of verse forms and mimetic techniques than epic did. Dis-
inclined to identify a single metaphysical truth at the heart of tragedy—unless it
was the vulnerability and mutability of the goods governed by fortune—early
modern critics often insisted that one formal characteristic or another was essential
to tragedy. Yet because they were aware that tragedy was a form that had developed
from the ancient world to their own day, they felt free to debate whether it had ever
achieved its perfect form. Who could be a tragic hero, whether tragedy had to be
written in verse, whether it might be improved by solo song or sung choruses, and
whether Aristotle’s remark on the typical length of tragedies was merely an obser-
vation of Greek custom or a rule founded on some fundamental condition of
­performance or perception—all these questions were up for debate. As they passed
over the spirit of tragedy to wrangle over the finer points of tragic verse, diction,
music, and stage spectacle, these early modern critics retraced ground traversed by
their ancient predecessors.46

T H E O B J E C T S O F T R A G I C I M I TAT I O N

Aristotle identifies three objects of tragic imitation: mūthos, ēthos, and dianoia.
Early modern scholars translate these as fable, manners, and sentiments, while
modern critics prefer plot, character, and thought. (Because my aim is to return
readers to the early modern horizon of expectations, I consistently favor early
modern terminology, even when it strains our current sense of Aristotle’s meaning.)
The fable is the soul of tragedy for Aristotle. That his notion of ēthos is not our idea
of character is underlined by the fact that he does not assume that all the persons
of a tragedy will exhibit ēthos. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that the tragedies of
most dramatists are aētheis, or character-less (Poetics 1450a24–5).47 “For Aristotle,”
as John Jones explains, “character (ēthos) is almost precisely ethical colouring. Its
discriminations are exclusively moral. . . . All familiar thought of the characters of

45 See Javitch (1998); and Mastrocola (1998) 71–155, esp. the table at 147. Although I disagree
with details of Mastrocola’s table, for example that tragedy should contain reversals and recognitions
and an unhappy unending, it is nevertheless a very instructive way to consider tragedy in comparison
with comedy, epic, satire, and romance.
46 William Marx (2012) 78 rightly stresses that Aristophanes subjects the dramatis personae, the
word choices, the musical styles, and the costuming choices of his great contemporaries to critical
scrutiny without ever identifying tragedy with a philosophical vision.
47 Dale (1969) 145–6. Also see Belfiore (1983–84); Lord (1969–70); Janko (1984) 229–31; Heath
(1987) 118–19. For the suggestion that tragedies in the fourth century BC were more than ever con-
cerned with complicated intrigues, see Xanthakis-Karamanos (1980) 3–34.
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70 What Was Tragedy?

friends or the characters in books must be set aside” because ēthos does not cast
“a net around personality” and “yields nothing to naturalistic expectation.”48
Halliwell concurs that Aristotle’s understanding of ēthos “interprets the behavior of
persons less in terms of individuality than by reference to a set of objective and
common standards.”49 Rather than treat every word uttered by a person as evi-
dence of character, the Poetics and the Rhetoric (1395b13) suggest that only explicit
declarations of a man’s will and what he has decided to do or maxims that reveal
his settled convictions are properly examples of rhetorical ēthos. In ordinary Greek
usage the word dianoia, Aristotle’s third object of tragic imitation, can be employed
“in almost every sense of our word ‘thought,’ and with ‘meaning’ and ‘intention’
added.”50 But because, in his discussion of the term, Aristotle especially praises
those moments when the persons on stage rage or express dejection in the most
natural way, leading spectators to recognize the same potential in themselves and
to enter into the feelings of the actors (Poetics 1455a–56a), early modern commen-
tators strongly associated dianoia with expressions of the passions. Having explained
that dianoia can reveal the manners of a person, Donati adds in his Art of Poetry
(1633) that its natural metier is pathos: “To speak with sentiments (sententia) is, in
particular, to speak with affect, and to stir the affections.”51 Early modern critics
were so determined to insert imitations of the passions into the Poetics that they
found ways to categorize them under action (by stipulating that actions included all
the motions of the soul when buffeted by passions), manners (since passions were a
cause and symptom of manners), and sentiments, since the most important form of
sentiment seemed to be the expression of a passion.52 The last option ­recommended
itself because it produced a neat alignment of the first three qualitative parts of tra-
gedy with the classification of melodies supplied by the Politics and with the three
objects of all the mimetic arts named in the Poetics: mūthos was a dramatic action,
ēthos a portrayal of manners, and dianoia an expression of passion.53

48 John Jones (1962) 31–2. 49 Halliwell (1998) 164. 50 Dale (1969) 147.
51 Donati (1633) 177. Earlier (175–6), Donati turns to Seneca’s Thyestes for an example of ethical
speech (morata oratio). As Atreus upbraids himself for inaction and resolves on an atrocious revenge,
he reveals his propensity for viciousness:
O undaring, unskilled, unnerved, and (what in high matters I deem a king’s worst reproach)
yet unavenged, after so many crimes, after a brother’s treacheries, and all right broken down, in
idle complaints dost busy thyself—a mere wrathful Atreus?
Ignave, iners, enervis et (quod maximum
probrum tyranno rebus in summis reor)
inulte, post tot scelera, post fratris dolos
fasque omne ruptum questibus vanis agis
iratus Atreus? (ll. 176–8)
Seneca (1917), trans. Miller.
52 For the first, see Giacomini (1972 [1586]) 3: 351: “under the name of action we comprehend
also the affects and internal motions (operazioni)”; and Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) in Dryden
(1956–89) 17: 41: “every alteration or crossing of a design, every new sprung passion, and turn of it,
is a part of the action.” For the second, see Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89)
13: 240: “Under the general head of Manners, the passions are naturally included, as belonging to the
Characters.” The third option is very widely preferred.
53 See the Politics 1341b, which reads, “we accept the classification of melodies made by some
philosophers, as ethical melodies, melodies of action, and passionate melodies.” The Poetics 1447a27–8
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 71

How these three objects of imitation could produce a dynamic series of causes,
actions, and sufferings is suggested by Ludovico Castelvetro’s summary of Hip-
polytus. As Castelvetro describes the play in his commentary of 1570, every action
in Euripides’ play has a cause that is rooted in the manners or passions of the per-
sons and a consequence that is a passion, whether affective (“passione angosciosa”)
or physical (“passione dolorosa”). These in turn become causes:
Thus the hope of satisfying her flaming desire caused Phaedra to act wickedly, seeking
her stepson’s love. That caused Hippolytus to feel a spiritual passion, and that induced
him to make the painful choice of abandoning his country and his father’s royal palace.
His departure in turn caused Phaedra to feel a spiritual passion, by which she was driven
to the evil device of accusing him, not withstanding the fact that he was innocent, of
assaulting her honor. Her action in turn caused Theseus to feel a spiritual passion, which
became the cause of his laying a horrible curse on his son, who was worthy of every
blessing. That action became the cause of the passion of Hippolytus’s cruel death, and
that passion was the cause of Phaedra choosing to hang herself by the neck with her own
hands, a horrible action that caused her to suffer a well-merited passion.54
As we consider how Aristotle’s commentators and early modern dramatists under-
stood each of the qualitative parts of a tragedy in isolation, we should bear in mind
that these discrete elements were always intended to impinge on and give signifi-
cance to one another as they do in Euripides’ tragedy.
Even so, Aristotle ranks them in order of importance. “The Subject [mūthos] is
the Principal, and as it were the Soul of Tragedy. The Manners follow next, and it
is absolutely as in Painting. For, if the finest Colours were mix’t on a Cloath con-
fusedly and without order, it would not give so much pleasure, as the simple
Sketches of a Draught” (Poetics 1450a38–b4).55 Early modern commentators dis-
play a certain resistance to this prioritization, conscious or not. For example, when
commenting on Poetics 1449b31 (“As they act the stories, it follows that in the first
place the Spectacle [or stage appearance of the actors] must be some part of the
whole”; trans. Bywater), Robortello comments that “the imitation of a tragedy may
be considered in two ways, either insofar as it is scenic and is acted by the actors or
insofar as it is made by the poet as he writes. If you think of it in terms of the poet
as he writes, then we may say that the principal end of tragedy is to imitate the
habitus of souls and the manners of men through written words, through which
description it is possible to discern whether men are happy or unhappy.” In other
words, Robortello does not emphasize the absolute priority of the fable and takes
action (actio) to refer to the player’s personation on stage.56 Although, as we noticed
in chapter 1, Aristotle’s comparison of the fable of a tragedy to the outline of a pic-
ture was one of the bases for the theoretical primacy of disegno over colorito among
Florentine art theorists of the cinquecento, the strength of the Venetian case in favor

reads, “For they [the dancers] too through their rhythms expressed in dance-figures represent manners
[ög] and passions [phg], and actions [pqnei|]” (my trans.). As Rees (1972) 3 points out, the last
two terms could simply mean “what men have done to them and what they do.”
54 Castelvetro (1978–79) 1: 301. 55 Aristotle (1705) 73.
56 Robortello (1548) 58, trans. (slightly differently) in Weinberg (1961) 393–4.
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72 What Was Tragedy?

of naturalism, color, and light, which was articulated by the humanist polymath and
tragedian Lodovico Dolce in 1557, was not lost on readers of the Poetics, who noted
that, just as Zeuxis and Polygnotus painted in different styles, with the former being
indifferent to manners and the latter perfectly expressing them, so too had ancient
poets differed in their excellences (Poetics 1450a24–8). Although the Jesuit Tarquinio
Galluzzi was able to explain Aristotle’s priorities, he could not forbear praising
the contribution that color made to the life-like impression of a painting. With the
glories of baroque Rome in his mind’s eye, he advised, “just as a painter scarcely
delights the eyes of those who look on if he uses no paints and no colors, or those
which are badly put together, but instead draws out the image and marks off the
panel with white lines only, so a poet does not afford such great delight if he com-
poses his fable well enough but nevertheless neglects the manners.” The poet should
arrange his colors “beautifully and elegantly” because they make “the wishes, plans,
habit, quality, temperament, and nature” of his stage persons not only “understood”
but “seen”: “For in Hippolytus we see the nature of a young man who is chaste, stern,
severe, contemptuous of pleasures, nearly with our very eyes; in Phaedra [we see] the
spirit of a woman who loves uncontrollably; in the nurse [we see] loyalty; in Theseus
[we see] rushing rage.”57 John Dryden likewise emphasized the visibility of the
manners. Describing the plot of a tragedy as its foundation, he observed, “the
ground-work indeed is that which is most necessary, as that upon which depends
the firmness of the whole Fabric; yet it strikes not the eye so much, as the beauties
or imperfections of the manners, the thoughts and the expressions.”58
By the eighteenth century, the Venetian case for color and light had penetrated
even the French Academy, where it was explained by Roger de Piles in his influential
treatises on painting, and some literary critics were prepared to reverse Aristotle’s
priorities: Both Jean-François Marmontel and Henry Pye claim, for example, that
the “tragic distresses” of the modern theater arise “more from manners and passion,
than incident.”59 When this resistance to Aristotle’s prioritization of the fable was
coupled with the association of history with action and of poetry with passion, or
of comedy with ēthos and of tragedy with pathos, the result could be a reversal of
Aristotle’s ranking, producing a hierarchy that ran not from action down through
manners to passion but one that set passion and manners atop action.60

FA B L E S

Early modern critics acknowledged Aristotle’s preference for complex tragedies,

which, in addition to a pathos, or a mortal action full of pain, included a reversal,

57 Galluzzi (1621) 257.

58 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1677) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 234.
59 Pye (1791) 195–7; cf. Marmontel (1763) 2: 39. On de Piles, see Puttfarken (1985).
60 For the association of history with action or changes of fortune and of poetry with the passions,
see Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) in Dryden (1956–89) 17: 32. For the association of ēthos with
comedy and pathos with tragedy, see Quintilian, Institutes 6. 2. 20; and Essay of Dramatick Poesie in
Dryden (1956–89) 17: 60.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 73

a recognition, or both. Most thought that while all tragedies included a metabasis,
or change of fortune, the reversal (peripeteia) of a complex plot was something
more, an about-face of events that overturned the hero’s intentions or the audi-
ence’s expectations. They also pondered the significance of recognitions in complex
plots.61 But into this economy they did not insert the hero’s hamartia: his error,
missing of the mark, or (in some accounts) derangement, fault, or sin.62 The point
is worth stressing because, in the commentaries of some twentieth-century critics
such as Else, hamartia and recognition operate in tandem, and the latter comes to
mean not just the rediscovery of a tie of kinship but something like tragic insight.63
In contrast, early modern commentators classify plays such as Racine’s Phèdre and
Shakespeare’s King Lear and Othello as simple because they lack a recognition of
persons, even though the principal persons may eventually come to a profound
understanding of their mistakes.64
We will come closer to the sensibilities of early modern readers by attending
to an excerpt from the lengthy plot summary of Oedipus the Tyrant that Rapin
­includes in his 1674 Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie (Réflexions sur la Poétique
d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes), a work translated by
Thomas Rymer and promoted by John Dryden:
But this Criminal whom all the World abhors before he is known, by a return of Pity
and Tenderness, becomes an Object of Compassion to all the Assembly; now he is
bemoan’d, who a moment before pass’d for execrable; and they melt at the Misfortunes
of the Person they had in Horrour; and excuse the most abominable of all Crimes,
­because the Author is an Innocent unfortunate . . . . Finally, this flux and reflux of Indig-
nation, and of Pity, this Revolution of Horrour and of tenderness, has such a wonderful
Effect on the Minds of the Audience; all in this Piece moves with an Air so delicate
and passionate, all is unravell'd with so much Art, the Suspensions manag’d with so
much probability; there is made such a universal Emotion of the Soul, by the Surprizes,
Astonishments, Admirations; the sole incident that is form’d in all the piece, is so nat-
ural, and all tends so in a direct line to the discovery and Catastrophe; that it may not
only be said, that never Subject has been better devised than this, but that never can be
invented a better for Tragedy.65
As Rapin writes, he bears firmly in mind Aristotle’s assertions that the most important
devices by which tragedy grips our feelings are parts of the fable, namely the peri­
peties and recognitions; that the unexpected can arouse powerful passions (Rhetoric
1383a8–12); and that “the Fable must be composed in such a manner; that he who
understands the things which happen, altho’ he see them not, yet tremble at the
Recitation of them, and feel the same Compassion, and the same Terror, none can
hinder themselves from feeling at the Tragedy of Oedipus” (Poetics 1453b4–7).66
The special appeal of the complex fable is that it moves the audience to wonder (to
thaumaston), but it can do so only at the risk of the scandalously improbable, as

61 Cave (1988) esp. chs. 2–3.

62 Bremer (1969) 67–91 surveys early modern commentaries.
63 Else (1967) 385; cf. F. L. Lucas (1981) 115ff; Cave (1988) 178–9, 184–5.
64 Dacier (1692) 197; Pye (1791) 197–8. 65 Rapin (1694 [1674]) 114–15.
66 Aristotle (1705) 234–5.
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74 What Was Tragedy?

Cave argues.67 That is one of the reasons that Marmontel insists that peripeties
may be achieved in modern tragedies by the contrary movements of the passions
(a technique unknown to the ancients).68 It is also why Daniel Heinsius says that
almost all fables are simple and that simple fables, because they entail less art, also
seem more natural.69
If most tragic fables are simple, then pathos must be the one indispensable ele-
ment of tragedy and its pure display must be able to achieve the end of tragedy. We
find this claim confirmed from Robortello’s great commentary of 1548, through
Dacier’s 1692 The Poetics of Aristotle (La Poétique d’Aristote), to Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing’s 1767 Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie).70 Recognition
and reversal “are no essential part of the fable, they only make the action more
varied and therefore more beautiful,” says Lessing, but without pathos “we can con-
ceive of no tragical action; every tragedy must have some sort of suffering, phg,
be its fable simple or involved, for herein lies the actual intention of tragedy, to
awaken fear and pity.”71 The priority given to pathos in early modern descriptions
of tragedy stands in stark contrast to its diminution in some twentieth-century
accounts. John Jones never mentions pathos in Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (1962),
and in The “Poetics” of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (1986), Stephen
Halliwell says that “pathos in itself is of minor importance.”72
As Aristotle defines pathos in the Poetics in only two lines—“I call Passion
[pathos] an Action which destroys some Person, or causes some violent Pains, as an
evident and certain Death, Torments, Wounds, and all such like things”—early
modern critics had to erect a great edifice on a slender foundation (Poetics
1452b11–13).73 Heinsius went so far as to reorder the Poetics in order to place
pathos on a more equal footing with recognition and reversal in Aristotle’s treat-
ment.74 Because Lessing’s predecessors were as keen as he to make the leap from
the pathos of the fable to the pity and fear of the audience, they often sought to
complete the circuit from the painful event staged to the affective response of
the audience. Heinsius said that “since the main aim of tragic plot is to stir
­passions . . . Aristotle made pathos the third part of the complex fable.”75 “That
which is called ‘pho|,’ Varro’s ‘passion,’ others’ ‘perturbation,’” wrote Donati
more expansively, “is a ‘mortal action, full of pain, as when deaths, torture, or

67 Cave (1988) 57–63; Hathaway (1968) 151–75; Robortello (1548) 103.

68 Marmontel (1763) 2: 116–20. 69 Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 34.
70 Robortello (1548) 102–3, 116–17; Dacier (1692) 164; Cave (1988) 131–4.
71 No. 38 in Lessing (1962 [1767–68]) 110.
72 Halliwell (1987) 223 n. 30. But for a strong counter-claim, see Rees (1972) 5: “Every tragedy
has a pathos: pathos is essential to tragedy. If we were to dispute this fact, we should make a nonsense
both of Aristotle’s discussion, already mentioned, of the kind of actions which arouse pity and fear,
and of our own experience of Greek tragedy. Peripeteia and anagnorisis may be characteristic of the
machinery of the complex plot but pathos is the focal action or event in every plot, whether simple or
complex, ‘the lever by which the tragic potentiality is converted into actuality’; without it there could
be no tragedy.” Also see Else (1965) 87–8 and (1967) 356–8, 415–21; Moles (1979); and Belfiore
(1992) 134–41.
73 Aristotle (1705) 164.
74 Bywater (1909) xix includes a table comparing Heinsius’ arrangement with the standard one.
75 Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 44.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 75

wounds happen in the open.’ This first exerts itself on the tragic actors, whose
lamentations are constant and from whom there is wailing in torture and in death.
Afterwards, it elicits the grief and compassion of the audience. Horace writes:
‘ . . . If you would have me weep, you must first express the passion of grief yourself;
then your misfortunes hurt me’ [Art of Poetry ll. 102–3].”76
The emphasis on pathos was so pervasive in early modern accounts of tragedy
that it could color the interpretation of concepts that were seemingly unrelated.
For example, although sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italian commen-
tators generally explained hamartia as an error or an involuntary deed committed
unwittingly (and therefore deserving of pity and forgiveness), Dacier glossed it
as “an involuntary fault, which has been committed either by Ignorance, or Impru-
dence, against the natural Temper of the Man, when he was transported by a
­violent Passion, which he could not suppress, or by some greater and external
force.”77 In such an account, the tragic fable could emerge less as a process of cog-
nitive discovery than as a story in which a violent passion (one form of pathos)
precipitated a violent act or physical suffering (another form of pathos).

MANNERS

I observed in chapter 1 that to refer to the “manners and disposition” of stage per-
sons is not just another way of appealing to “character” as a critical category. I stress
the point because, even though literary critics have worried about the frailties of
traditional character criticism for decades, directors, actors, teachers, and even
scholarly editors are still apt to refer to the motivation or development of characters,
especially when writing in shorthand. Scholars have voiced two broad objections
to the practice: first, that it treats dramatis personae as if they enjoy an autonomous
existence apart from the text, even though they are subject to the larger poetic
or performative requirements of the work and, indeed, of literary tradition; and,
second, that the assumptions about agency, psychology, and selfhood that under-
write modern appeals to character may not match the constructions of self
uncovered by the anthropological study of cultures distant from our own (such as
ancient Greece or renaissance England).78

76 Donati (1633) 149–50.

77 Dacier (1692) 192; Bremer (1969) 67–80. Besides the several Italian commentators discussed
by Bremer, see Donati (1633) 124, where he explains that hamartia is not a sin or a crime but a mis-
take, a hallucination, or a mental alienation.
78 The critical literature on character as a concept is vast. The introductions to Jebb (1896) and
Bradley (1992 [1905]) are among the finest examples of character criticism. Recent examples that
continue the tradition with few reservations include Vickers (1973) esp. 3–6; Nuttall (1984); and
Bloom (1998). For representative attempts to write about characterization and individuality in Greek
literature, see T. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1917); Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) ch. 3; Gill
(1990) and (1996); Halliwell (1990); Easterling (1973), (1977), and (1990); Goldhill (1986) chs. 4 and
7 and (1990a); Gould (1978); Pelling (1990b); and Padel (1992). On Seneca, see esp. Bartsch and Wray,
eds. (2009) and Braund and Gill, eds. (1997). Also see Hook (2000); and Fitch and McElduff (2002).
Representative post-structuralist accounts or New Historicist accounts of character in Shakespeare
include Jonathan Goldberg (1985); Stallybrass (1986); Maus (1995); Orgel (2002) ch. 2; and McLeod
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76 What Was Tragedy?

By insisting that the early modern poetics of tragedy offered critics nothing but
the categories of manners and sentiments to discuss the dramatic representation of
personhood, I am not arguing that these categories exhaust the construction of
early modern selfhood, which also drew on religious, political, legal, and historio-
graphic discourses. Nor am I claiming that the six qualitative parts that Aristotle
happened to list in the Poetics are adequate to Attic and Roman tragedy or that
early modern readers were incapable of perceiving and responding to features of
ancient or modern plays that Aristotle left unnamed. But I do aver that manners is
not just another word for “character” and that its peculiar denotations and conno-
tations are crucial to interpreting early modern tragedy.
As we have already seen, the English word manners is a translation, via the Latin
mores, of the Greek ēthos. In early modern criticism, discussions of manners often
invite us to view the actions of stage persons in what Christopher Gill describes as
“a determinate ethical framework,” treating them “as psychological and moral
‘agents’, that is, as the originators of intentional actions for which they are nor-
mally held responsible and which are treated as indexes of goodness or badness
of character.”79 But early modern poets and critics glossed Aristotle’s rules for
representing manners—that they be good, agreeable, like, and consistent (Poetics
1454a16–b14)—in light of Horace’s ampler treatment of the subject, and Horace’s
advice on how to fit the manners of persons to their native country, sex, rank, pro-
fession, and time of life (Art of Poetry, ll. 114–18, 153–78) in turn encouraged
poets to draw on ancient and modern discourses of medicine, political philosophy,
comparative politics, and geography, which treated the manners and dispositions
of persons or of entire populations as facts of nature or statistical generalizations.
Such sources suggested that there were any number of forces that could dispose
but not compel a man to act: gods, angels or demons, the stars, climate, par-
entage, education, humoral complexion, age, sex, and habits. René Le Bossu lists
most of these as the sources of manners, and Dryden concurs, saying that the
manners “are either distinguish’d by complexion, as choleric and phlegmatic, or
by the differences of Age or Sex, of Climates, or Quality of the persons, or their
present condition: they are likewise to be gather’d from the several Virtues, Vices,
or Passions.”80
The frontispiece of Thomas Walkington’s The Opticke Glasse of Humors, first
printed in 1607, summarizes how several sources of manners were thought to relate
to each other—at least until the mid-seventeenth century, when alternative med-
ical and scientific theories began to erode belief in ancient views of the body (Fig. 2.3).
Because the authors of the Hippocratic and Galenic Corpus had little access to the
invisible workings of the body, they tended to deduce interior processes from the
visible workings of the cosmos and to treat man himself as a microcosm of nature.

(1991). Holbrook (2010) is hard to categorize. For a recent attempt to launch a “new character criti-
cism,” see Yachnin and Slights, eds. (2009). On the more general difficulties of defining persons, see
Bernard Williams (1973); A. O. Rorty, ed. (1976); Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes, eds. (1985).
79 Gill (1990) 2.
80 Le Bossu (1697 [1676]) 161–4; Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89)
13: 235.
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Fig. 2.3. Thomas Walkington, frontispiece of The Opticke Glasse of Humors [1607]. c. 1631?
Folger Shakespeare Library. STC 24968.
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78 What Was Tragedy?

Walkington’s diagram suggests this idea by placing man’s body at the center of the
universe. His “complexion” is the balance of the four humors created during dif-
ferent stages of digestion: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The humors
correspond in turn with the four temperaments, the four ages of man, the four
periods of the day, the four seasons, the four winds, the four elements, the four
primary qualities (hot, dry, cold, and wet), the planets, and the constellations.
Blood, to select just one of these humors as an example, predominates in young
men, during the spring, at night, when the west wind blows, and in particular cli-
mactic conditions. Although descriptions of affective dispositions vary widely,
Walkington’s characterization of sanguinary men can serve as an e­ xample of the
genre. They are, he says,
very affable in speech, and have a gracious faculty in their delivery, much addicted to
witty conceits, to a scholar-like [facetiousness, not acerbity]: quipping without bitter
taunting; hardly taking anything in dudgeon, except they be greatly moved . . . : they
be liberally minded; they carry a constant loving affection to them chiefly unto whom
they be endeared, and with whom they are intimate, and chained in the links of true
amity, never giving over till death such a conversed friend, except on capital
discontent. . . .81
As Lily Campbell argued in the early twentieth century, Shakespeare may have
­imagined the young Hamlet with a temperament like this, until intense mourning
or rage super-heated his blood and the by-product, known as “melancholy adust,”
threw him into a state of protracted grief and depression.82
Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, Places and Albertus Magnus’ The Nature of Places
imagined that bodies were in commerce with their surroundings, absorbing some
of the characteristics of the local air and water and becoming relatively fleshy
or spiritous depending on the climate. Because of their humoral dispositions,
­according to Jean Bodin, southerners were subtle, able to achieve by policy what
they could not by force, and gifted as mathematicians, artists, and divines. They
were also “cruell and revengefull, by reason of melancholie, which doth inflame the
passions of the soule with an exceeding violence, which is not easily suppressed,”
“giuen to lust, the which growes by reason of the spongious melancholie,” and
prone to jealousy. Yet Bodin was aware that a crude typology could not account for
the manners of different cities. He allowed that latitude east or west, proximity to
water, the prevalence of winds, and the lay of the land all influenced the dispos-
ition of a people. The history of migration proved that climate and topography
could make a people change their customs, their form of government, and even
their language. And yet education, custom, and government could also resist the
shaping power of place and the recalcitrance of the body.83
Both Aristotle’s discussion of ēthos in the Poetics and the accounts of manners to
be found in this geo-humoral discourse encouraged the audience to type the per-
sons on stage rather than to remark their idiosyncrasies. But because the manners
of a stage person could be conceived as the product of choices influenced by
81 Walkington (1639) 59. 82 Lily B. Campbell (1930) 112.
83 Bodin (1962 [1576]) 555–7, 565–8.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 79

­ umoral disposition, social rank, gender, and national customs but nevertheless
h
freely undertaken, manners as a critical category negotiated the interstices between
the individual and the group, agency and determinism. The manners of Othello
and Desdemona, to take an example analyzed by Mary Floyd Wilson, are the
product of geography, complexion, custom, and education, the significance of
which is contested in the drama.84 Othello thinks he is not given to jealousy
­because he has the cold temperament of a black complexion, but students of the
Arabic geographer Leo Africanus, whose account of Africa influenced Bodin,
might have suspected a black Moor of being lusty, jealous, and prone to violence.
Othello supposes that Desdemona should be cold, moist, and chaste, but her
young palm feels hot, and sea-faring and commercial peoples are known for their
changeable ways and their capacity for deception. It is precisely by trading in this
language of natural law, national custom, and humoral disposition that Iago is able
to infect Othello’s imagination and undermine his capacity for faith, insinuating
that for Desdemona, “Not to affect many proposed matches / Of her own clime,
complexion, and degree” smells of a “will most rank” and “thoughts unnatural”
(3.3.229–33).85 Thus an attention to manners, and not just to character, reveals
some of the basic tensions and ambiguities of volition and determinism in early
modern tragedy.

SENTIMENTS

Although other literary forms could represent the actions, manners, and senti-
ments of men, early modern critics and dramatists insisted that, as a performed
and embodied art, tragedy had a peculiar power to present the ebbs and flows of
the passions together with the physical symptoms wrought by them. The Stoics
might observe that anger is a short madness, remarks Sir Philip Sidney, but “let
Sophocles bring you Ajax on stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking
them the army of Greeks with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell
me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger than finding in the schoolmen
his genus and difference.”86
Because they believed that the passions could arise from the body and exert their
tyranny over it, early modern dramatists were attracted to language that compared
the somatic experience of vehement feeling to a raging storm. Consider the lament
of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, who finds his own passions whipped up by the
tears and sighs of his raped and mutilated daughter:
When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threatening the welkin with his big-swollen face?
And wilt thou have reason for this coil?

84 Floyd-Wilson (2003) ch. 6.

85 All citations from Shakespeare are from the Arden editions listed in the bibliography.
86 Sidney (1970 [1595]) 28–9.
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80 What Was Tragedy?

I am the sea; hark how her sighs doth blow!
She is the weeping welkin, I the earth:
Then must my sea be movèd with her sighs,
Then must my earth with her continual tears
Become a deluge, overflowed and drowned,
For why my bowels cannot hide her woes,
But like a drunkard must I vomit them. (Titus Andronicus 3.1.222–32)
King Lear’s cries on the heath initially suggest a more obscure relationship between
the storm without and the coil within, but he too eventually insists on the
connection:
Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to the skin: so ’tis to thee;
But where the greater malady is fix’d,
The lesser is scarce felt. Thou’ldst shun a bear;
But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea,
Thou’lst meet the bear i’th’mouth. When the mind’s free
The body’s delicate; this tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there—filial ingratitude! (King Lear 3.4.6–14)
Here, the storm without is the bear, a fearful threat but nothing like the tempest
within, which is a roaring sea. Such imagery would become so conventional in
arias in the next century that it can be hard to remember that the basis of the topos
was a somatic experience of overmastering force.
The tempests that the early moderns felt roiling inside them did not necessarily
find their origin or their termination within the boundaries of the self. This is an
important point to stress to readers reared in the conventions of character criticism,
with its assumption of autonomous personhood. Sermons, spiritual autobiog-
raphies, and medical treatises all attest that the early moderns, unlike most of us
today, experienced their selves not as bounded egos but as voids open to spiritual
influences. In the colorful imagery of Lancelot Andrewes, “a house will not stand
empty long. One spirit or other, holy or unholy, will enter and take it up”; to be
yourself, as Debora Shuger has observed, was to be inhabited by something other
than yourself.87 To men and women who experienced passions as imperious
strangers who presented themselves uncalled, the sudden movement of animal and
vital spirits associated with them could feel like a spiritual influx.
But whatever the origins of the passions might be, dramatists had to rely on
speeches, first and foremost, to express them. “Tis not the admirable Intrigue, the
surprising Events, and extraordinary Incidents that make the Beauty of a Tragedy,”
says Rapin in a passage that Dryden repeats with approval, “it’s the Discourses,
when they are Natural and Passionate.”88 Yet neither critics nor dramatists agreed
on what a natural and passionate speech should sound like. The disagreement

87 On the “pneumatic self,” see Shuger (1990) 97–105 at 100, where she quotes Andrewes (1854)
3: 191.
88 Heads of an Answer to Rymer (1677–78) in Dryden (1956–89) 17: 193.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 81

turned on whether dialogue should reproduce what men and women actually said
when fraught with passion (thus leaving the audience, as it were, on the outside
looking on), or should instead create an audible similitude of their hidden thoughts
and feelings.
Proponents of the first approach often admired the brisk dialogue of the Eliza-
bethan stage. Dryden’s Neander maintains that “short Speeches and Replies are
more apt to move the passions, and beget concernment in us then the other: for it
is unnatural for any one in a gust of passion to speak long together, or for another
in the same condition to suffer him, without interruption.”89 The same standard
of verisimilitude and naturalness suggested that illustrious persons in the heat of
action or the grip of passion might employ apostrophes, exclamations, ironies,
imprecations, interrogations, and exaggerations but would not have the patience
to concoct comparisons, allusions, antitheses, and maxims.90 Thus a speech like
King Lear’s “O me, my heart! my rising heart!—but down” (2.4.118) might win
high praise: “By which single line the inexpressible anguish of his mind, and the
dreadful conflict of opposite passions with which it is agitated, are more forcibly
expressed than by the long and laboured speech, enumerating the causes of his
­anguish, that ROWE and other modern tragic writers would certainly have put in
his mouth.”91 On the other hand, Shakespeare’s passionate speeches were often
faulted for being too pregnant of simile and his soliloquies censured for being too
long, sedate, and disconnected from the action. Charles Gildon went so far as
to insist that there was not a single soliloquy in Shakespeare, including Hamlet’s
“To be, or not to be,” that could be “excus’d by nature or reason.”92
Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy could be defended, however, by poets
who considered the inner movements of the soul to be the objects worthiest of
imitation, and it certainly underlines how effectively a pathetic speech can forestall
our impulse to judge. Poets committed to recording the inner movements of the
soul tended to prefer simpler dramatic actions in order that they might, as Dryden’s
Lisideius puts it, “have leisure to dwell on a subject which deserves it; and to pre-
sent the passions (which we have acknowledg’d to be the Poets work) without
being hurried from one thing to another.”93 The ideal of this sort of dramaturgy
was to set a passion in motion, propel it with a series of reasons, images, and examples,
and then bring it to a point of plenitude. In some cases, like the famous stanzas
that end Act 1 of Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (1637), such a speech might be set off
formally. In six stanzas of ten lines each, written in an irregular meter intended to
express irresolution and anxiety, Roderick endures a wild storm in his breast as he
works through his intolerable options: He can kill the father of his beloved, thus
defending his honor but alienating Chimène; or he can spare her father, thus losing
his honor and becoming unworthy of her. It is little surprise that Marc Antoine

89 An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) in Dryden (1956–89) 17: 48.

90 See La Mesnardière (1640) 339–90; d’Aubignac (1684) bk. 4, ch. 8.
91 Warton, Adventurer, No. 113, December 4, 1753 in Vickers (1974–81) 4: 70–1.
92 Gildon (1721) 207.
93 An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) in Dryden (1956–89) 17: 37.
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82 What Was Tragedy?

Charpentier, perceiving the musical quality of the stanzas, set three of them in
1681 as a series of operatic airs linked by recitative and ritornellos.94
The artistic imperatives that drove the amplification of pathetic speeches in
declaimed tragedy also encouraged the development of dramma per musica. Disap-
pointed that neither their dramatic representations nor their music possessed the
marvelous power to move the affections that they found described in ancient texts,
and impelled by that disappointment to re-examine the theater and music of the
Greeks, a handful of Italian humanists concluded that tragedies had been sung
throughout and that, rather than confusing the emotional point of their melodies
with polyphony, the Greeks had used modes whose pitch and rhythm could sustain
imitations that were close to actual passions and that could therefore transform
the souls of listeners. As we shall see in chapter 4, these conclusions paved the way
for the dramatic form we know as opera. In early examples such as Claudio
Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), Arianna (1608), and The Return of Ulysses to his Country
(Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, 1640), the long pathetic speeches are usually charac-
terized by a more pronounced use of meter, rhyme, and affective text repetitions
that set them off from the surrounding recitative. In some cases such as the
­immensely influential lament of Arianna, the music takes its form from the rhet-
orical emphases and refrains of the verse itself, as the heroine’s passions progress
from despair (“Lasciatemi morire”), to disbelief (“Dove, dove è la fede”), to a
furious desire for revenge (“O nembi, o turbi, o venti”), and then through shame
(“Non son, non son quell’io”) to resignation (“Mirate, ove m’ha corto empia for-
tuna”). Such pathetic speeches are long—fifty to eighty lines of verse.95 By the late
seventeenth century, however, most librettists had begun to alternate passages of
action and dialogue (written in free verse and set as recitative) with passages in
which the dramatis personae could respond to the action in closed poetic forms set
as arias. The text of such arias was usually brief: two stanzas of four to six lines, with
the first stanza announcing a passion or determination and the second qualifying
or contradicting it. But its musical development was ample and might endure for
ten minutes.96
Although aria-based operas advanced an action and depicted the manners of
their dramatis personae, the importance they attached to arias meant that, first and
foremost, they presented a gallery of monuments to the passions. To be sure, the
inexhaustible variety of melodic and motivic development, rhythm and texture
made the aria form immensely expressive in the hands of masters such as Handel,
Hasse, and Mozart, but its conventional association of certain keys, tempos, and
motives with particular passions and classes of person nevertheless meant that its
arias could be categorized into types (such as the rage aria) and even transposed

94 The three airs (H.457–9) were originally published in 1681 in the Mercure galant (January–
March). They have been recorded on Charpentier: Les plaisirs de Versailles, Les Arts Florissants, Erato
063014774–2 (1996). See Hitchcock (1988); Murata (1995) 406.
95 On these laments, see Rosand (1979); Tomlinson (1981); and the special issue on laments that
appeared in Early Music 27 (1999).
96 On the early development of arias in Venetian operas, see Rosand (1991) 281–321. On its forms
in the eighteenth century, see James Webster (2009).
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 83

from one opera to another (hence the “suitcase arias” of traveling virtuosi). The
effect was to emphasize the primacy of passion over manners or action. The appeal
of ensemble pieces in which all the persons of the drama were brought to feel the
same passion at the same time only underlines where the priorities lay. Examples
of the form include the ensemble that ends Act 1 of Mozart’s 1775 The Make-believe
Gardiner (La Finta Giardiniera), in which all the dramatis personae are brought to
sing of their rage (“Che smania orribile!”), and the quartet of Act 3 of Mozart’s
Idomeneo (1781) (“Soffrir più no si può”), in which the four principle persons
­declare that they can bear no more, that their sorrow is worse than death, that no
one has ever borne greater pain. Such ensembles must be distinguished from choral
scenes in which a crowd responds spontaneously and unanimously to the same
stimulus. What makes them such coups de théâtre is that the personages converge
on the same passion at the same time, even though they have arrived at it by dif-
ferent routes and for different reasons.
Because theorists of the passions held that the body had a tendency to remain
fixed in the same state once its spirits had been deranged by a vehement passion,
early modern dramatists had only four plausible options open to them once they
had developed a passion to the point of plenitude. They could allow the person
affected to regain equilibrium off-stage—hence the popularity of the exit aria.
They could drive him through an ascending or descending scale of passions like the
one that David Garrick was able to perform on call, changing from “wild delight
to temperate pleasure, from this to tranquility, from tranquility to surprise, from
surprise to blank astonishment, and from that to sorrow, from sorrow to the air
of one overwhelmed, from that to fright, from fright to horror, from horror to
despair.”97 They could take advantage of the fact that passions could combine into
compound affective states and then disaggregate into simple passions again to stage-­
manage affective transformations, as John Ford does in The Queen (1621), shifting
the king from simple hate to pure love by way of jealousy, a passion that contains
the two. Or they could introduce fresh stimuli to set the spirits of their characters
into motion again, thus making them susceptible to different passions. These
might be provided by the entrance or exit of persons, but they could also be fur-
nished by dreams, prophecies, messages, even unlooked-for thoughts, like the
one that elicits Lear’s, “O! That way madness lies; let me shun that; / No more of
that” (3.4.21–2).
The dramatic imperative to renew the passions explains a great deal about the
way Dryden constructs his scenes. Act 4 of Aureng-Zebe (1674) opens, for instance,
with the imprisoned hero contemplating the prospect of his own death in tones
reminiscent of Hamlet’s: “Death in itself is nothing, but we fear / To be we know
not what, we know not where” (4.1.3–4). We would expect him to react with aver-
sion to the entrance of his step-mother, whom he believes to be working against his
interests, but he is too tired of life to care about the intrigues of the court. When
she begins to address him with winning words, he is struck with amazement: She
has presented herself in a new light that he can only wonder at. He becomes slowly

97 Diderot (1957) 33.

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84 What Was Tragedy?

mollified as she assures him of her good will, but when he realizes that she is
making an incestuous proposition his attitude hardens into odium. Like a Roman
mime, he strikes one affective pose after another as Dryden furnishes fresh stimuli
for what he conceives as pneumatic reactions.

DICTION

When Aristotle calls “diction” (lexis) one of the means of tragic representation, he
is referring to the stylistic choices that a poet makes when he writes speeches for his
stage persons, finding words to express their meaning and making their language
pleasing by the addition “of rhythm and harmony [and song]” (Poetics 1449b28–9,
1450b12–16; trans. Else). Whereas post-idealist accounts of tragic language
­inspired by Friederich Schlegel and Friederich Hölderlin often dwell on the dis-
continuities between sign and meaning in tragic language, or on the appearance of
the monstrous when tragic language begins to turn back on itself, early modern
accounts of tragic language take their start from Aristotle’s dictum that “The per-
fection of Diction is for it to be at once clear and not mean” (Poetics 1458a18;
trans. Bywater).98 That can best be accomplished, says Aristotle, by using a mixed
speech whose ordinary words secure the requisite clarity and whose foreign terms,
neologisms, metaphors, and ornamental periphrases make it choice. The diction of
tragedy cannot be as archaic or strange as that of epic, however, for the characters
must speak in “iambic verse, which models itself as far as possible on the spoken
language.” It should therefore limit itself to the words that an orator can use
(1458a22–59a16). In his Discourse on Tragedy (1590), Nicolò Rossi affirms these
requirements. He explains that tragic diction should be “magnificent and grave”
because tragedies concern great matters such as “the government of kingdoms, the
reasons of the gods, and similar things.” The poet must be at liberty to use all of the
figures of rhetoric, such as simile, metonymy, metaphor, hyperbole, and antithesis
if he is to express and move the passions. Yet he should be wary of vague or ornate
speeches because men whose souls are perturbed do not use such language.99 In
France, La Mesnardière and d’Aubignac endorsed and elaborated such principles.100
Simple and declarative speeches that relied on the music of the verse rather than
on metaphor could appear noble only if poets obeyed rigorous rules of linguistic
exclusion. Dryden objected to the “spoke and fallyes” of Fortune’s wheel and to the
“clout” and “blanket” that served Hecuba in lieu of royal robes in the Player’s
speech of Hamlet because they sounded like the images that would occur to a poet
who had been “bound Prentice to a Wheel-wright” or “a Ragman.”101 When Pierre

98 On the first prominent application of Friedrich Schlegel’s account of “romantic irony” to

Sophocles, see Goldhill (2012) 252–6; on Hölderlin’s account of tragic language, see Schmidt (2001)
ch. 4; and Billings (2014) ch. 7.
99 Rossi (1974 [1590]) 4: 99–100.
100 La Mesnardière (1640) 339–90; d’Aubignac (1684) bk. 4, ch. 8; Bray (1963); and Reese (1937)
150–207.
101 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 245.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 85

La Tourneur attempted to render Shakespeare into French faithfully in the 1770s

without losing the ring of nobility that he heard in the original, he was constantly
forced to avoid literal translations that would have sounded indecorous in the
French theater. In Macbeth, the word “man” became guerrier, noble companion, and
illustre collègue; in King Lear, the “sky” became the firmament; in Hamlet, the
prince’s jibe to Polonius, “yourself, sir, shall grow as old as I am, if like a crab you
could go backward,” was omitted altogether because nothing could be done with
the crab. Even so, Voltaire’s disciple Jean-François de la Harpe complained about
the use of the word cuisse (thigh) in Othello’s exclamation, “Behold! I have a
weapon. / A better never did sustain itself / Upon a soldier’s thigh.” “It's part of the
special delicacy of our language,” said La Harpe, “not to admit into the noble style
words which denote certain parts of the body. . . . This word cuisse would spoil, for
French ears, the most beautiful phrase.”102 Other national traditions never sub-
mitted to such draconian restrictions, but they all relied on linguistic exclusion to
achieve dignity.

T H E P L AY E R ’ S PA S S I O N S

The vital contribution of the actor was appreciated even by French classicists such
as Samuel Chappuzeau, who observed that just as a discourse lacked half its force
unless delivered by an orator, so a dramatic poem depended on the flourishes of
the actors to achieve its great effect in the theater.103 What were those flourishes?
Andrea Perucci’s 1699 A Treatise of Acting from Memory and Improvisation (Dell’Arte
rappresentativa, premeditata ed all’improviso), one of the earliest treatises devoted to
the art of acting, offers instructive answers, for we find that he covers two main
topics: how to portray the manners of types such as old men, young lovers, and
women, and how to express passions and sentiments such as requited love, des-
pairing love, and defiance of fortune. Manners and passions had to be considered
in tandem because age, gender, humoral complexion, and national custom could
all inflect the expression of passion. Indeed, it was considered one of the peculiar
excellencies of Sir Thomas Betterton, the greatest actor of the Restoration stage,
that he could suit his displays of passion to his role: “Those wild impatient Starts,
that fierce flashing Fire, which he threw into Hotspur, never came from the unruf-
fled Temper of his Brutus (for I have, more than once, seen a Brutus as warm as
Hotspur) when the Betterton Brutus was provok’d, in this Dispute with Cassius, the
Spirit flew only to his Eye.”104
After conveying the sense of the verse, the actor’s principal duty was to translate
that verse into an affective script.105 James Burgh’s The Art of Speaking, which
­appeared in at least seven British and eight American editions between 1761 and
1804, outlines the procedure in an introductory “Essay, in which are given Rules

102 These examples are drawn from Pemble (2005) 84–6.

103 Chappuzeau (1876 [1674]) 9. 104 Cibber (1968 [1740]) 62.
105 On early modern acting styles, see Roach (1983); Barnett (1987); and Orgel (2002) ch. 15.
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86 What Was Tragedy?

for expressing the principal Passions and Humours, which occur in Reading, or
Public Speaking” and then provides exercises for the reader by printing numerous
speeches under headings that outline the sequence of passions that should be
performed. For instance, the unsuccessful attempt of Claudius to pray in Hamlet
appears as “Lesson 59. REMORSE. Attempt at REPENTANCE. OBDURACY.
DESPAIR” (Fig. 2.4). Burgh’s marginalia provides a more detailed affective script
that the orator is asked to enact by following Burgh’s instructions on the expression
of the passions.106 Not just individual speeches but whole roles could be translated
into a passionate sequence with a definite shape and rhythm. What distinguishes a
great actor from a mediocre one, maintains Denis Diderot in The Paradox of the
Actor (1770–78), is that “His passion has a definite course—it has bursts, and it
has reactions; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”107
Both the dignity of its personages and the grandeur of its passions dictated that
tragedy should be performed in the high style that Quintilian described as slow,
weighty, and marked by wide vocal modulation and protracted harmonies (Institu-
tio Oratio, 11.3.60, 84, 111–12, 116).108 Racine reportedly wrote down the pitch
(ton) in which Mademoiselle Champmeslé should deliver every syllable of his tra-
gedies, and Elkeniah Settle praised Charles Hart for a “perfectly Musical” voice
that had made the Theatre Royal “all Harmony.” The abbé Dubos considered the
musical line that actors took through lines of tragic verse to be too important to be
entrusted to them. He suggested that poets adopt a musical system of notation for
their plays. Perhaps intrigued by the idea, Joshua Steele made musical transcrip-
tions of David Garrick’s delivery of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, and
the conductor of the Comédie-Française recorded the pitches used by the great
actress Mademoiselle Clairon when reciting the same monologue by Voltaire on
four different occasions. (He reported that they were precisely the same each time.)
Tragic pronunciation and recitative were kissing cousins. Indeed, Voltaire remarked
that if the young wanted to know how tragedians had declaimed on stage when he
was young, they should listen to the recitative at the French opera.109
In the silent language of the body, composure was expressed by adopting a cont-
rapposto stance, which embodied an ideal of repose and tranquility animated by a
potential for action. French tragedians underlined the ethical significance of this
stance by using the word “repos” to refer to the state of peace that persons enjoyed
when they were free from vehement passions.110 In Racine’s Phèdre et Hippolyte,
for example, the heroine recalls the moment before her fatal passion in just these
terms: “My tranquility, my happiness seemed to be secure [Mon repos, mon bon-
heur semblait être affermi]” (l. 271).111 This repose of the soul was assumed to

106 Burgh (1787) title page, 213. 107 Diderot (1957) 15.
108 On the epic, plain, and intermediate styles of gesture, see Barnett (1987) 325–46.
109 Settle (1680) 1; Dubos (1748 [1719]) 3: 234–44. On Steele’s transcription of Garrick, see
Holland (2010) 29–31. On Voltaire’s remark, which comes from his entry “Chant” in the Dictionnaire
philosophique, see Lote (1912) 329. On the ties between tragic declamation and recitative more gen-
erally, see Rosow (1983) and Winn (1996–97). On rhetoric and melody, see Ranum (2001).
110 On repos as a spiritual ideal, see Stanton (1975). On repose as a gesture, see Barnett (1987)
158–60.
111 I cite Racine (1989).
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Fig. 2.4. A lesson from James Burgh, The Art of Speaking, teaching how to read texts for the
passions implied by them. Shown here in the seventh edition of 1787, the text was first
published in 1761.
Houghton Library, Harvard University 9280.761.70.
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88 What Was Tragedy?

manifest itself in the balanced opposition of forces on display in the resting body,
in hand gestures that followed the line of beauty, and in the S-shaped stage move-
ment of actors in full command of their bodies and their environment. When
confronted with a new object or surprising news, the tragic actor would often
­express silent wonder by opening his eyes, mouth, and nostrils wide, standing
stock still with his legs close together, and holding his arms up with his hands open
as if he were uncertain whether to welcome or to avert the object before him
(Fig. 2.5). If his wonder hardened into astonishment, thus depriving his muscles
of spirits, he might remain still like a statue. Otherwise, as he came to form an
opinion of whether the object was good or evil, his wonder would yield to a passion

Fig. 2.5. Charles Le Brun, A study of wonder and admiration (1660–61). Preparatory drawing
for The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander, or the Tent of Darius. Musée du Louvre.
© RMN–Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 89

that ­depended on his judgment. If he felt joy at the sight, his body would express
his elevation of spirits (Fig. 2.6a–b); if he felt sorrow, it would respond to his depres-
sion (Fig. 2.7a–b). When, on the other hand, he was reacting to some desired good
or a dreaded evil, his expectation would more often be expressed on the horizontal
axis. When King Lear shuns the thought of his ungrateful daughters, exclaiming,
“O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; no more of that!” (3.4.21–2), he
should, then, turn his back on it and repel it with a gesture (Fig. 2.8). Thus the
most basic unit of tragic action consisted of an actor being dislodged from his pos-
ture of repose and driven through wonder to some other vehement passion that
impelled his features and limbs in one or more of the cardinal directions. Passions
such as adoration and contempt combined two of these actions, for those who
adore look up to the object they desire and seek to approach it, while those who
feel contempt look down on the object they spurn and seek to repel it.
That the passions tended to follow each other in natural sequences—infinite in
variety, yet nevertheless bound by natural laws—was suggested by the way they
could be developed from proximate passions. Wonder, which Donati defines as
“that part of fear occasioned by some object, sense-perception, or mind that
­exceeds our reasoning faculty,” could be transformed into terror by drawing the
eyebrows together, raising the trembling hands higher, and drawing a foot back-
ward to prepare for flight.112 This is the stance that Betterton assumed when, as
Hamlet, he saw the ghost of his father in Gertrude’s closet; an engraving from the
edition of Nicholas Rowe depicts the prince’s terror at the apparition of the ghost
and Gertrude’s amazement at the conduct of her son (Fig. 2.9). By averting his
gaze and extending his hands more forcefully, the actor could express aversion,
raising his hands high in recognition of its superior force if he was terrified
(Fig. 2.10a), holding them lower if he felt simple odium (Fig. 2.10b). Garrick
could reportedly make the transition from one passion to another at will, as if
practicing scales.113
Did actors have to feel these powerful passions in order to incite them in the
audience? No lesser authority than Horace seemed to answer yes in a passage to
which we have seen Donati appeal: “If you will have me weep, grief must first be
yours: then, O Telephus or Peleus, will your misfortunes hurt me” (Art of Poetry ll.
102–4). But Quintilian undertook a more subtle investigation of the problem.
Distinguishing between true affections and fictive ones, he observed that the
former erupt naturally but lack art and must be formed by methodical training,
while the latter imply art but lack the sincerity of nature: “consequently in such
cases the main things is to excite the appropriate feeling in oneself, to form a
mental picture of things, and to exhibit an emotion that cannot be distinguished
from the truth.” This mental picture was a fantasy or vision “whereby things absent
are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actu-
ally to be before our very eyes.” Quintilian implied that for an actor, the dramatic
text could supply that vision. He had noticed that the “mere delivery of words
written by another” had the power to set the souls of actors “on fire with fictitious

112 Donati (1633) 163. 113 Diderot (1957) 33.

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90 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 2.6a. Charles Le Brun, Joy (La joie) from On the Expression of the Passions (Conference sur
l’expression des passions). The ebullient spirits associated with joy and ecstasy force the facial fea-
tures and hands upwards. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
© RMN‑Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

affection” (Institutio Oratio 11.3.61–2, 6.2.29, 35). This is the process that Hamlet
memorably describes after listening to the Player’s speech:
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her workings all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba! (Hamlet 2.2.545–52)
Polonius’ distaste for the actor’s performance should remind us that such raw por-
trayals of passion were not to everyone’s taste, but in the early modern period,
stories of actors becoming lost in their passions were more often repeated with
approval. Aesopus’ performance of “Atreus planning to take vengeance on Thy-
estes” was one of the most frequently retold: According to Plutarch, Aesopus so
lost “control of himself in the heat of passion” that “when one of the assistants
suddenly ran across the scene,” he “smote him with his sceptre and laid him dead.”114

114 Cicero 5.3–4 in Plutarch (1917).

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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 91

Fig. 2.6b. Ecstasy (Extasis), a detail from D. Fermin Eduardo Zeglirscosac, Essay on the
origin and nature of the passions, of gesture, and of theatrical action (Ensayo sobre el origen y
naturaleza de las pasiones, del gesto y de la accion teatral). Madrid, 1800. The figures provided
by D. Francisco de Pazula Marti display habits and passions, the chief units of theatrical
significance in the early modern period.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Such was the power of a vision when it had taken full possession of the mind to
affect the spirits, direct the movement of the blood, and overmaster the body. This
physical expression of passion had the same power over the body of the audience
that the actor’s vision had over his own, for the action of a thespian exhibiting
pathos, said Thomas Wright in 1604, cried out “with all the universal life and
body . . . [,] ‘Thus we move because by the passion we are moved, and as it has
wrought in us so it ought to work in you.’ ”115
But the actor did not have to rely on the poet for his visions: He could muster
them from his own psychic history. As Michel Le Faucheur (an important influ-
ence on Betterton’s conception of acting) explained, ancient actors “kept their
Imagination still at work upon real Subjects and private Afflictions of their own,
which they lay very much to Heart; and not upon Fables or Fictions of the Play they
acted, which did not touch them at all in effect.” To illustrate this procedure, he
told the story of the actor Polus, recorded by Aulus Gellius and recounted in

115 Thomas Wright (1986 [1604]) 213–14.

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92 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 2.7a. Charles Le Brun, Sadness (La tristesse) from On the Expression of the Passions
(Conference sur l’expression des passions). The languid spirits associated with sadness weigh
down the features of the face and the gestures of the hands. Musée du Louvre.
© RMN–Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by the likes of Giacomini, Nicolò
Rossi, the Jesuit Louis de Cressoles, and the playwright Georges de Scudéry. When
Polus (c. 300 bc), the finest actor of his age, returned to the stage after a hiatus
occasioned by the death of his son, he appeared in the title role of Sophocles’
Electra, a work “whose plot is so constructed that Electra, thinking that she carries
her brother’s remains, bewails and bemoans his death.” “Clad in Electra’s mourning
garb,” Gellius recounts, Polus received into his arms no mere stage prop but the
urn of his dead son, so that he might fill the theater “not with imitations and feign-
ings, but with true and living grief and lamentations. Thus while it appeared that
a fable was being enacted, what was acted out was his pain.”116

S P E C TA C L E

Aristotle treats spectacle (opsis) as the least artistic element of a tragedy, but as early
modern readers were quick to note, he concedes that it can arouse tragic fear and
pity (Poetics 1453b1). Robortello, reversing Aristotle’s priorities, said that from one

116 Le Faucheur (1680?) 186; Gellius (1927) 6.5.1–5. See Holford-Strevens (2005) 499–523.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 93

Fig. 2.7b. Sadness (Tristeza), a detail from Zeglirscosac, Essay on the origin and nature of the
passions (Ensayo sobre el origen y naturaleza de las pasiones). Madrid, 1800.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

point of view (the actor’s rather than the poet’s) the spectacle (apparatus) could be
seen as the end of tragedy, for all the other qualitative parts—fable, manners, senti-
ments, diction, and melody—could only be realized in performance, their telos.117
In this passage, Robortello takes “action” to refer not to the events of the fable but
to its realization on stage. Nevertheless, commentators recognized that the role
­assigned to spectacle could vary widely from one tragedy to another. Castelvetro
distinguished between plays whose actions could “be communicated to the audi-
ence by little more than the language” and plays that could “be mounted only with
a great variety of costumes, much expense, and elaborate stage sets.” Oedipus the
Tyrant was an example of the first kind. Tragedies of the second kind included “the
Eumenides and the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, in the first of which the chorus
of Furies must appear in eerie transformations, while in the second Prometheus
must be chained to a replica of Mount Caucasus and must be visited by a number
of different deities.” Conscious that Aristotle had ranked spectacle last among the
six qualitative parts, Castelvetro maintained staunchly that spectacle should not

117 Robortello (1548) 57; Weinberg (1961) 393–4. Orgel (1973) offers a classic account of the
renaissance case for spectacle.
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94 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 2.8. Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785–86). Illustration of the gesture to
accompany, “O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; / no more of that!” (King Lear
3.4.21–2). This book was translated into English by the actor Henry Siddons as Practical
illustrations of rhetorical gesture and action, adapted to the English drama (1807); it was also
translated into French and Italian. All the translations copy Engel’s illustrations.
Houghton Library, Harvard University Typ 720.85.363.

“be spurned because it is the work of an art other than that of poetry or because it
entails great expense or because the poet is an artist of higher rank than the costu-
mier. The one relevant consideration,” he says, making a concession to Horace’s
objection to stage violence and improbable metamorphoses in his Art of Poetry
(ll. 179–88), “is whether a proposed piteous and fear-inspiring spectacle can be
staged realistically.”118
Early modern humanists left no stone unturned in their efforts to recreate the
wonders of the Greco-Roman stage. In the reconstructions of the apparatus of the
ancient Romans produced by the Jesuits Martin Delrio and Tarquinio Galluzzi,
the Eumenides rise up from the “lowest steps,” spirits emerge from “the stairs of

118 Castelvetro (1978–79 [1570, 1576]) 1: 385 and (1984) 149.

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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 95

Fig. 2.9. The closet scene depicted in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare (1709). With
his overturned chair and backward step, Hamlet displays terror, while Gertrude, who does
not see the ghost, remains seated, expressing simple amazement at the conduct of her son.
Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Charon,” water gods are poured onto the stage using a revolving device, gods are
suspended in mid air using one type of crane, mortals are raised from the earth
using another (“as Orithya was by Boreas, Memnon by Aurora, Medea by her
heavenly serpents”), heroes are transformed into gods using a revolving machine
(“as occurs in Hercules Oetaeus”), scenes of violence are revealed using a moveable
platform, lightning strikes, thunder rolls, and an “automaton” performs unnamed
wonders “driven nearly by its own power.” We read of stages of gold (like that of
Petreius), silver (like that of Antonius and of Murena), and marble (like that of Marcus
Scaurus); and we are told of scenes that rotate on hinges (like that of Curio) and
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96 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 2.10a. Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785–86). The figure of Terror contains a
gesture of aversion whose raised hands imply a feeling of inferiority to the feared object.
Houghton Library, Harvard University Typ 720.85.363.

open to reveal pictures (like one mentioned in the Georgics). Statues, paintings,
draperies, fountains playing amid the audience, and showers of petals all contribute
to the tragic pomp.119 Delrio concludes, “We ought to embrace that stage apparatus
that once sowed in the mind wonder mixed with pity and fear, but nevertheless
contained nothing monstrous or portentous.”120
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, some stage engineers such as
Gian Lorenzo Bernini went to extravagant lengths to deploy the apparatus of the
stage to arouse fear and wonder: They set the stage on fire or diverted a river toward
the audience, stopping it at the last moment with an invisible dam.121 But by the
middle of the century, and particularly in France, most scenographers had concluded
with Descartes that a sense of security was one of the prerequisites of entertaining
sympathetic feelings in the theater, and they respected the boundary between stage

119 Delrio (1593–95) 18–19; Galluzzi (1621) 271–2. Galluzzi follows Delrio very closely.
120 Delrio (1593–95) 19–20.
121 Fahrner and Kleb (1973); Warwick (2013). More generally on Italian renaissance and baroque
stage design, see, for primary texts, Pallen, ed. (1999); Ingegneri (1989 [1598]); and [Rinnucini]
(1983 [1628]). Also see Zorzi and Sperenzi, eds. (2001); Bjurström (1961); and Milesi, ed. (2000).
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 97

Fig. 2.10b. Odium (Odio), a detail from Zeglirscosac, Essay on the origin and nature of the
passions (Ensayo sobre el origen y naturaleza de las pasiones). Madrid, 1800. Odium contains
the same gesture of aversion displayed by Terror, but the downward slope of the arms implies
contempt for the object.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

and theater. Jean Berain might have considered this sense of boundaries a matter
of bienséance. He emphasized the regularity, order, and design of his scenes pre-
cisely because, if one of their functions was to create an illusion, another was to
disclose their own artifice (Fig. 2.11).122
By the early eighteenth century, even the scenographers for opera productions
often preferred to forgo spectacular machine effects in favor of perspective scenes
that were drawn at an angle oblique to the sight-lines of the audiences. Courts and
public opera houses were finding it difficult to pay both for the extravagant fees of
celebrity singers and for the costly machine effects that could introduce deities to
the stage, and the poets of the Arcadian reforms had decided, in any event, that
opera seria should confine itself to the historical plane. But the scena per angelo was
also a response to political circumstances and changing theories of cognition and
affect. The one-point perspective favored by the Medici, the Gonzaga, the Farnese,
and the kings of France privileged the eye of the ruler. In his ducal or royal box,

122 On Berain, see La Gorce (1986); and Hoxby (2007).

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98 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 2.11. Jean Berain, a public square. For Thomas Corneille and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s
Médée, Act 1 (Paris, 1693, Académie Royale de Musique).
Centre historique des archives nationales, Paris (COTE 01*3242, f°17).

which was often designed like a miniature stage, he performed the role of monarch
and affirmed his unsurpassed ability to see in true perspective. The player-king,
framed by the triumphal arch that marked the vanishing point of the perspective,
reflected, and perhaps added to, the charisma of the royal spectator. Scenes drawn
in oblique perspective, on the other hand, did not create such an evident hierarchy
within the audience because they were intended to defy the eye; they could make
“each of the spectators feel as important as the prince.”123 And for precisely that
reason they never gained favor in France.
John Locke’s sensationalist psychology lent support to scenes drawn in oblique
perspective for different reasons. It encouraged the idea that greatness, or, as
­Addison described it, the “largeness of a whole View, considered as one entire
Piece,” challenged the cognitive and affective capacities of viewers, flinging them
into a “pleasing Astonishment,” producing a “delightful Stillness and Amazement
in the Soul,” and soliciting the subsequent expiation of the eye and action of
mind that was one of the sources of men’s delight in the mimetic arts.124 Whereas
scenographers in the seventeenth century had striven to evoke wonder with rapid
scene changes and miraculous stage metamorphoses, their heirs in the early eight-
eenth century began to place their faith in the suggestive power of extent. Their
scenes did not impress a sharp and striking image on the imagination; they invited
the imagination to play. As Esteban de Arteaga explained in his account of opera

123 Kernodle (1944) 170. On the scena per angelo, see Mayor (1945); Ferrero (1970); and Forment
(2009).
124 No. 412, June 23, 1712 in Addison (1965) 3: 540.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 99

Fig. 2.12. Francesco Bibiena. Design for a stage set drawn in oblique perspective (known
as the scena per angolo), probably for the Teatro Academico nel Porto, Bologna, 1703.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

seria (1783), the chastened and regularized opera championed by Pietro Metastasio,
“since the secret of the fine arts is to present things so that the imagination does not
stop where the senses stop, but that there is also something left to be imagined
which the eye does not see and the ear does not hear, so the departure from per-
spectives running to a central vanishing point and thus constituting, so to speak,
the limit of visual and imaginative power, was like opening up an immense path
to the busy, restless imagination of those beholding the scene from a greater
distance.”125 In such scenes, staircases spiral to imperceptible heights, steps des-
cend to hidden depths, and absent presences lurk around the corner (Fig. 2.12).
As the tragic action unfolded in these grand settings, the souls of the stage persons
became associated in the minds of the spectators with the sublimity of their sur-
roundings, and the scene, by the same laws of association, became imbued with
the pathos of the events that had transpired before it. This was an art of cumulative
suggestion and affect.

T H E C H O RU S

The function of the tragic chorus, according to one strain of idealist interpret-
ation announced by Friedrich Schiller in an essay prefaced to his Bride of Messina
(1803), is to serve as “a living wall that tragedy draws about itself in order to shut
itself definitely away from the actual world and preserve for itself its ideal ground

125 Arteaga (1783) 1: 332–3. Mayor (1945) 24 and Forment (2009) 31 both quote and translate
the passage.
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100 What Was Tragedy?

and its poetic freedom.” On this account, the chorus “purifies the tragic poem by
disassociating reflection from the action and by endowing reflection itself with
poetic power through this very disassociation.” The chorus “brings calm” to the
action, ensuring that the spectator’s feelings “retain their freedom even amid the
most vehement passion; they must not be the victim of impressions but rather
they must come away serene and clear from the agitations sustained.” By “holding
the parts separate and by intervening between the passions with its calming obser-
vations,” the chorus “gives us back our freedom, which would otherwise be lost
in the storm of emotional agitation.”126 In A. W. Schlegel’s famous formulation
of 1808, “The Chorus is the ideal spectator. It mitigates the impression of a
heart-rending or moving story, while it conveys to the actual spectator a lyrical
and musical expression of his own emotions, and elevates him to the region of
contemplation.”127
The strikingly different terms in which early modern critics discussed the func-
tion of the chorus are clearly laid out in John Dennis’ dialogues, The Impartial
Critick: or, Some Observations upon a Late Book, Entitled “A Short View of Tragedy,”
Written by Mr. Rymer (1693). These dialogues pit Beaumont (an apostle of Rymer
and Dacier) against Freeman (Dennis’ mouthpiece). Beaumont alleges that the
chorus contributes both to the verisimilitude of the action and to the moral effect
of the representation. Because “Tragedy is the imitation of a Publick and Visible
Action,” it ought to be witnessed by a “numerous multitude.”128 He clearly has in
mind Dacier’s claim, “One might say that it is the chorus that creates all the likeli-
hood [vraisemblance] of tragedy.”129 Their presence on stage not only ensures that
the poet will respect the unities of time and place and will preserve a continuity of
action, it permits him to transmit moral instruction. For it is the peculiar function
of the chorus to “deliver Moral Sentiments to the People” and to “reflect upon
what is vicious and commendable in the Characters of the primary Actors. . . . Now
the Chorus being retrench’d from our Modern Tragedy, Morality must be retrench’d
at the same time.” The principal persons cannot assume this role by speaking
­sententiously, says Beaumont, because they are “shaken by violent Passions” and
“Sentences require Reflection, and that requires Serenity.”130
Freeman counters that the lesser persons of modern tragedies can be drawn into
the affairs of the illustrious with greater plausibility than a crowd, but even if the
necessity of a meddling multitude were conceded, how, he asks, could “Dacier
infer from hence, that these People thus concerned, ought to sing and dance at the
Princes Sufferings?”131 Consider the absurdities into which even Sophocles falls. In
his Electra, the chorus advise Electra not to lament so loudly lest she be heard by
Aegisthus, “yet as soon as ever she is gone, they grow infinitely louder, and in a

126 “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy” in Schiller (1962) 7, 9–11.
127 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 70. On idealist accounts of the tragic chorus, see Goldhill (2012) 166–200;
and Billings (2013a) and (2013b).
128 Dennis (1939–43) 1: 36.
129 Dacier (1692) 312; Aristotle’s Art of Poetry (1705) translates this less literally, “the Chorus lays
the Foundation of the Probability of the Action” (233).
130 Dennis (1939–43) 1: 34–5. 131 Dennis (1939–43) 1: 36–7.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 101

Consort of Fifteen Voices, threaten Ruine to Clytemnestra and her Adulterer.”132

To Beaumont’s claim that the continuous presence of the chorus on the stage assures
the audience of the continuity of the action, Freeman responds that Racine observes
the unities scrupulously in his early tragedies, which lack a chorus, and has not tied
himself to the unity of place or a stable chorus in Esther and Athaliah.133 The
chorus is not essential to the theater’s duty to serve as a “School of Vertue.” Tra-
gedies can accomplish that end by purging the passions of the audience and by
teaching “some Moral Doctrine by the Fable, which must always be allegorical and
universal.” If the “Manners” of a tragedy are “well painted,” then “every Actor” will
discover “immediately by what he says, his Inclinations, his Designs, and the very
Bottom of his Character” so that there is no need for the chorus to pronounce
judgment on him.134
In fact, says Freeman, the chorus threaten to undermine the end of tragedy by
working against its cathartic effect:
the Chorus in some measure must calm an Audience which the Episode disturb’d by
its Sublimity, and by its Pathetick; and therefore he who makes use of a Chorus in
Tragedy, seems to do like a Physitian, who prescribing a Dose of the evacuation of
peccant Humors, should afterwards order Restringents to be taken in the midst of its
kind Operation. The Song of the Chorus must be forreign from the matter, or per-
tinent: If forreign from the matter, it must not only calm the Mind in some measure,
but take it off from the subject. But if it is never so pertinent, it must very much cool
a Reader, if not a Spectator. . . .135
Not all of Dennis’ contemporaries agreed that the effect of a sung chorus was to
calm the mind; indeed, as we shall see in chapter 4, one of the principal motives
for introducing music to the tragic stage was that some humanists believed that it
had made an indispensable contribution to the affective power of ancient drama,
especially in its kommoi, or laments sung in dialogue with the actors. But the
­majority of his contemporaries would have agreed that if the chorus did intervene
to ease the impression of the action on the audience, the effect would be undesir-
able. Thus, even as Dennis’ dialogue suggests how widely early modern accounts of
the chorus could differ, it also highlights two shared assumptions that separate this
early modern discourse from idealist accounts. Both Beaumont and Freeman treat
the chorus as a multitude that participates in the action and that enjoys the same
mimetic status as the other dramatis personae. To be sure, early modern critics note
that the chorus is distinguished from the “heroes or leaders” who dominate the
action by dint of their social status. They are usually “farmers, citizens, soldiers,
women,” or “foreigners,” as Vossius says.136 But they do not treat the chorus as a
wall that separates the stage from reality, ensuring the aesthetic autonomy of the
work of art. Nor do they assume that the chorus ought to insulate the audience
from their own passions. Such novel claims are the product of a radical critical

132 Dennis (1939–43) 1: 37. 133 Dennis (1939–43) 1: 32.

134 Dennis (1939–43) 1: 34–5. 135 Dennis (1939–43) 1: 33.
136 Vossius (2010 [1647]) 1: 555.
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102 What Was Tragedy?

break that occurs around 1800 with the emergence of the idealist philosophy of
the tragic, as Joshua Billings has recently argued.137
In his commentary on book 6 of the Poetics (which Freeman paraphrases at
length in Dennis’ dialogue), Dacier asks why the Athenians associated music and
dancing with tragic actions. How could they think it natural or probable that a
“Chorus, which represented the Spectators of such an Action, [should] Dance
and Sing after such lamentable and extraordinary Events”? Dacier’s reluctant con-
clusion was that the Greeks had followed “their Natural Inclinations” and their
superstitions; they liked dancing and music, and these played a principal part in
their religious ceremonies. The chorus, which initially sang songs of praise for the
gods, and especially to Bacchus, was eventually integrated into the tragic action.
For Dacier, it was not an essential but a “becoming and ornamental” part of ­ancient
tragedy.138 Most authors concurred that the chorus was not an essential part of the
tragic action. It could thus be dispensed with in declaimed tragedies. But they did
not, like some classicists writing under the influence of Idealism, try to deny to
the historical reality of Greek tragic dance altogether.139 Nor did most spurn the
potential of the chorus to contribute to the pomp, spectacle, and ravishing sensu-
ality of theatrical performances. They simply believed that its natural home in the
modern world was in the school theater or the opera house, where moderns could
attempt to revive Greek tragedy with “music, dancing, and all the imperial pomp,
with which, at the brilliant periods of a Sophocles and Euripides, she was wont to
be escorted.”140

TRAGIC PLEASURE

One of the chief reasons that early modern critics valued the chorus was that it
could give pleasure by means of the charm of its music, the magnificence of its
spectacle, and the festiveness of its dance. Yet to refer to the “pleasure of tragedy”
at all is now acutely “uncomfortable,” as A. D. Nuttall writes: “Quite apart from
the original basic collision between terrible matter and delighted response, there is
an awkwardness, somehow, in the very mildness of the term ‘pleasure’—it seems a
puny word to set beside the thunderous term ‘tragedy.’ ”141 Yet early modern critics
do set it beside tragedy, arguing, with Aristotle, that tragedies please, first, because
they arouse wonder and permit us to learn; second and more obscurely, because they
yield the pleasure proper to tragedy (Poetics 1453b11–14); and third, because
music is pleasing.

137 Billings (2013b). 138 Dacier (1692) 82–3, trans. in Aristotle (1705) 82–3.
139 Lewes (1845) goes to ingenious lengths to prove that “there was no dancing whatsoever in the
Greek tragic chorus.” Vossius (2010 [1647]) 1: 399–407 is more typical of early modern attitudes.
Although it does not consider dancing or song essential elements of all tragedies, it acknowledges their
importance to Greek tragedy and speaks of them in some detail. The Jesuit Menestrier writes exhaust-
ively about song and dance in (1972a [1681]) and (1972b [1682]).
140 Algarotti (1767) 12. 141 Nuttall (1996) 1.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 103

As we saw in chapter 1, commentators distinguish between the pain occasioned

by the events depicted on the stage and the pleasure afforded by an artful imita-
tion. The tragic poet “does not deal with what does not please,” says Antonio
Sebastiano Minturno, “nor does he move the passions without pleasure. He excites
and transports spurred on by the force of words and by the gravity of sententiae,
and he moves violently when he arouses admiration either through terror, or pity,
or both.”142 When the Orestes of Iphigenia among the Taurians “is saved by an
unforeseen recognition from impending death,” explains Castelvetro, “we feel two
pleasures, the one ­because we apprehend something happen which we thought
impossible, which is the pleasure that properly springs from the marvelous, and the
other because something has happened that we wanted to occur,” but even when it
is revealed in Oedipus the Tyrant that the son has unwittingly married his mother
we feel pleasure mingled with our displeasure, for, though we abominate the event,
we are still pleased to learn of something happening that we thought impossible.143
Nicholas Malebranche, an Oratorian priest and rationalist follower of Descartes,
comments in 1675 that, like the spectators at a magic show, tragic audiences like
to “linger” in the state of wonder because the soul receives a “secret pleasure” from
the “abundance of spirits affecting it that are aroused by the object of its aware-
ness,” and it prefers to “perceive its wealth” rather than to expend these spirits in
pursuit of the knowledge that would break the spell.144
One of the things that we learn from tragedy, according to many early modern
commentators, is to esteem our own capacity for sympathy. “The affinity that exists
between human beings and the pathetic inclines us to view with pleasure a spec-
tacle that reveals our natures to us,” says Giraldi, “and is responsible for the fact
that the humanity we possess affords us ample scope for pitying the misfortunes of
those in distress.”145 Castelvetro likewise observes that when we concern ourselves
with a person on stage, we take our feelings as evidence of our own goodness,
“which recognition is of the greatest pleasure to us because of the natural love that
we bear ourselves.”146
Yet commentators also attempted to identify a pleasure peculiar to tragedy and
independent from the pleasure we take in wonder or learning.147 Appealing to the
Rhetoric (1370b), Robortello suggested, in a passage to which we will return in the
next chapter, that “there is an element of pleasure even in mourning and lamenta-
tion for the departed.”148 Giacomini identified tragic pleasure with cathartic relief.149
But René Descartes offered what would become the most influential explanation
for the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his Passions of the Soul (1649),
he maintained that the physical stimulation of the animal spirits was pleasurable in

142 Minturno (1970 [1559]) 179, quoted and translated with minor differences in Weinberg
(1942) 110.
143 Castelvetro (1978–79 [1570, 1576]) 2: 175.
144 Malebranche (1997 [1674–75]) 387. 145 Giraldi (1554) 285.
146 Castelvetro (1978–79 [1570, 1576]) 1: 391; cf. 1: 365–6.
147 Wasserman (1947). 148 Robortello (1548) 150.
149 Giacomini (1972 [1586]) 3: 363.
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104 What Was Tragedy?

and of itself, provided it was harmonious and not so overwhelming as to damage

the nervous system. Even such passions as sadness and hatred, “when these Pas-
sions are caused only by strange adventures, which he sees personated on a stage,
or by such like occasions, which not being capable to trouble us any way, seem to
tickle the Soul by touching it.”150 Rapin drove this home in his Reflections:
“Nothing is more sweet to the Soul than agitation,” and “of all Passions Fear and
Pity are those that make the strongest Impressions on the Heart of Man.” When
“the Soul is Shaken, by Motions so Natural and so Humane, all the Impressions it
feels becom[e] Delightful; its Trouble pleases, and the Emotion it finds, is a kind
of Charm to it. . . .” For Rapin, this agitation of the soul was not just one of many
sources of pleasure afforded by tragedy, it was the sole source: “in this Agitation
consists all the Pleasure that one is capable to receive from Tragedy.”151 The abbé
Dubos, whose reflections were widely read not only in France but in England and
Germany, did the most to popularize this idea in the eighteenth century. The soul
is naturally sluggish, he says, yet nothing is so disagreeable to it as lassitude; it
therefore pursues any pastime that will provoke the passions, and it is particularly
attracted to the strong passions of tragedy, which produce an agitation whose
pleasure more than compensates for the pain attendant on pity and fear.152
Critics in the eighteenth century integrated Dubos’ claim into more compre-
hensive accounts. Tragedies please, they said, because they stir “the Action of the
Mind, which compares the Ideas that arise from Words, with the Ideas that arise
from the Objects themselves”; because they delight us with their proof of artistic
mastery—their “force of imagination,” “energy of expression,” “power of num-
bers,” and “charms of imitation”; because our inner knowledge that we are watching
a fiction affords a sense of security that permits us to feel agitated without feeling
truly threatened; because interpreting imitations of the actions, manners, and pas-
sions of men continually employs our moral faculty, whose activity causes us to
reflect with pleasure on our moral natures; because “no distress that produces tears
is wholly without a mixture of pleasure”; and because we are gratified by the reflec-
tion that we are removed from the scene of suffering.153 Any attempt to reconcile
all these causes of tragic pleasure tended to be highly personal, but Bishop Hurd’s
may stand as an example of the species.154 Commenting on Horace’s directions to
the poet and actor on how to charm and lead the souls of hearers where they would
(Art of Poetry ll. 99ff.), Hurd tried to explain where he found his own soul being
led during a tragedy:
Not only our attention is rouzed, but our moral instincts are gratified; we reflect with joy
that they are so, and we reflect too that the sorrows which call them forth, and give this

150 Art. 47 in Descartes (1650) 75. 151 Rapin (1694 [1674]) 9, 112.
152 Dubos (1748 [1719]) 1: 47–51.
153 No. 418, June 30, 1712 in Addison (1965) 566–7; Hume (1757) 196; “An Inquiry into Those
Kinds of Distress Which Excite Agreeable Sensations” in Aiken and Barbauld (1773) 195.
154 Wasserman (1947) 296 discusses attempts to combine or at least list several of these explan-
ations. Instances include Hume (1757); Gerard (1764) 51–2, 72, 81–4; Batteux (1764) 73–4, 82,
95–6; An Essay upon the Present State of the Theatre (1760) 46–56; [Derrick and Wilkes] (1759) 34–6;
Edward Taylor (1774) 23–4.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 105

exercise to our humanity, are but fictitious. We are occupied, in a word, by a great event;
we are melted into tears by a distressful one; the heart is relieved by this burst of sorrow;
it is cheered and animated by the finest moral feelings; exults in the consciousness of its
own sensibility; and finds, in conclusion, that the whole is but an illusion.155
Critics influenced by Shaftesbury’s philosophy of sympathy attacked such syn-
theses on two grounds. First, they rejected the claim that our sense of security from
the perils beheld in the theater was itself a source of pleasure. And second, they
insisted that even if the line of critics from Descartes to Dubos was right to assert
that the soul takes pleasure in being stirred up by the passions, such an explanation
was insufficient to explain why men and women enjoyed tragic representations
more than any other exciting entertainment. To claim that, as the strongest pas-
sions, fear and pity were capable of producing the greatest agitation in the souls of
an audience was not, in their estimation, sufficient to close the case.
They singled out Thomas Hobbes as the source of the first claim with which
they differed. In his analysis “Of the Passion of them that flock to see danger,”
Hobbes had commenced by paraphrasing a passage from Lucretius’ epic On the
Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), which some sixteenth-century commentators
on the Poetics had in fact already quoted in an effort to explain why men attend
tragic performances:156
Pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore
upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy,
but because to perceive what ills you are free from yourself is pleasant. Pleasant is it
also to behold great encounters of warfare arrayed over the plains, with no part of
yours in the peril.
Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis,
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;
non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas,
sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.
suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri
per campos instructa tua sine parte pericli. (On the Nature of Things 2.1–6)157
For Hobbes, the pity we feel at such a spectacle causes a grief that is painful, but our
sense of present security gratifies our self-love, and the novelty of the scene satisfies our
appetite for knowledge.158 Addison does not agree that we are capable of taking such
a pleasure “when we see a Person actually lying under the Tortures that we meet with
in a Description; because, in this Case the Object presses too close upon our Senses,
and bears so hard upon us, that it does not give us time or leisure to reflect on our-
selves.” But when we merely read of “Torments, Wounds, Deaths, and the like dismal
Accidents,” we are able to make a “secret Comparison . . . between our selves and the
Person who suffers” that teaches us “to set a just Value upon our own Condition, and
make us prize our good Fortune, which exempts us from the like Calamities.”159

155 Hurd (1776) 101–2. 156 See Hathaway (1947) and Wasserman (1947) 292–5.
157 Lucretius (1992), trans. Rouse.    158 Hobbes (1650) 115.
159 No. 418, June 30, 1712 in Addison (1965) 3: 568–9.
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106 What Was Tragedy?

“This Pleasure must indeed be a secret one,” objected Frances Hutcheson in

1724, “so very secret, that many a kind compassionate Heart was never conscious
of it, but felt itself in a continual state of Horror and Sorrow.” He offered an en-
tirely different explanation: “our desiring such Sights flows from a kind Instinct of
nature, a secret Bond between us and our Fellow-Creatures.”160 Burke concurred
that the pleasure that an audience felt when watching a tragedy was not distinct
from that which they experienced when watching a public execution; it was a
fainter version of the same. “It is absolutely necessary my life should be out of
­imminent hazard before I can take delight in the sufferings of others, real or
­imaginary,” yet it is a fallacy, he says, that “this immunity is the cause of my
­delight”: The true cause is our real sympathy for distress.161 Sympathy was pleas-
urable, Anna Laetitia Barbauld observed, because man’s natural system attached
a degree of satisfaction to every passion or action that was productive of the
general welfare.162
Once critics had redefined the passions that tragedy excited as the social affec-
tions, or what Lessing describes as all the stimuli to philanthropy, they could
­explain why tragedies appealed to audiences more strongly than card games.163
Lord Kames argued that the traditional division of the passions into forms of
­appetite and aversion associated with pleasure or pain needed to be revised because
there were many painful impressions that had “no degree of aversion in the com-
position.” Grief was painful, he observed, but “we cling to the object which raises
our grief, and love to dwell upon it.” Although reason and self-love may counsel us
to seek pleasure and shun pain, our “affections . . . operate by direct impulse,” and
“as they are not influenced by any sort of reasoning, the view of shunning misery,
or acquiring happiness, makes no part of the impulsive cause.” Nature, “which
­designed us for society, has connected us strongly together, by a participation in
the joys and miseries of our fellow creatures.”164 A “man who, with the most undis-
sembled compassion, bewails the wretched and undeserved fate of Desdemona,”
concurred George Campbell, does not reflect with satisfaction on his own good
fortune in being free of such a husband; he feels pity, an emotion that contains an
element of love and desire.165
Many discussions of tragedy from the mid- to late eighteenth century make
sparing use of the language of sympathy without any apparent suspicion that it
could undermine the Aristotelean rules, overthrow the bienséances, or make their
favorite tragedies by Corneille, Dryden, Racine, Metastasio, or Voltaire seem out-
moded. Yet once a theory of moral sentiments was brought to bear on the tragic
ideals of the seventeenth century, its power to erode them was considerable. In his
Dedication to The London Merchant (1731), George Lillo had asserted that “Tragedy
is so far from losing its Dignity by being accommodated to the Circumstances
of the Generality of Mankind, that it is more truly august in Proportion to the

160 Hutcheson, Hibernicus’s Letters, No. 10, June 5, 1725.

161 Burke (1757) 26–8. 162 Aiken and Barbauld (1773) 120.
163 No. 77 in Lessing (1962 [1767–68]) 190; Dickson (1967).
164 Lord Kames (1751) 10–11.
165 George Campbell (1776) 1: 322, 324, 326, 328, 332.
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An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy 107

Extent of its Influence, and the Numbers that are properly affected by it.”166 Lillo
implicitly assumed that the generality of mankind could truly sympathize only
with persons like themselves, and the author of An Essay Upon the Present State of
the Theatre (1760) agreed: “the distresses of private life, are at least as well calcu-
lated for the scene, as the fate of kings and empires; nay, the former seem to have
the advantage as they come more home to the bosoms of the spectators; who,” as
the Prologue of the Fair Penitent says, “Learn to pity woes so like their own.” If
we could but “divest ourselves of vulgar prejudices” and seriously attend to the
maxim that “all fellow-feeling has its source in self-feeling,” then, he argued, we
might even approve of Lillo’s boldness in writing an “affecting” tragedy of “low-
life.”167 Heartened by Diderot’s appreciation of Lillo’s play, Lessing also insisted
that the “names of princes and heroes” might “lend pomp and majesty to a play,”
but they could “contribute nothing to our emotion. The misfortunes of those
whose circumstances most resemble our own, must naturally penetrate most
deeply into our hearts, and if we pity kings, we pity them as human beings, not
as kings.” Lessing defended this claim in Aristotelean terms. Commenting on
the Rhetoric’s observation that “everything is fearful that would arouse our pity
if it were to happen to someone else” and that “we find everything deserving of
pity that we should fear were it in store for us,” he argued that the fear that tragic
audiences felt was a form of self-pity that derived “from our similarity with the
suffering character.”168
In contrast, most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theorists had reasoned
that heroes who fell from the greatest heights of fortune would excite the pro-
foundest feelings of woe and wonder. Dryden and Lee conclude their Oedipus with
a spectacle predicated on this assumption. Appearing at his lofty window, the blind
king enjoins the gods to wonder at his daring and to “shout and applaud” him with
a “clap of Thunder”:
Once more, thus wing’d by horrid Fate, I come,
Swift as a falling Meteor; lo, I flye,
And thus go downwards, to the darker Sky. (5.1.459–61)
In full view of the audience, he then flings himself from his window. In stark con-
trast to Dryden and Lee, Lessing takes sympathy, not wonder, as his starting point,
and as a result, he concludes that what is important not only for moving pity and
fear but for inducing the pleasures attendant on all philanthropic stimuli is not
how far the hero falls but how close the audience feels to him. Thus, by the mid-
eighteenth century, reasoning upon certain key passages in the Poetics led some
critics to discount what once seemed to be a sine qua non of tragedy, that it should
present a noble or illustrious fortune. Yet the concern of these critics with tragedy’s
power to arouse pity and fear confirms that they are part of a continuous, if
evolving, conversation that extends from the sixteenth through the eighteenth
centuries.

166 Lillo (1731) iv. 167 An Essay Upon the Present State of the Theatre (1760) 3–4.
168 Nos. 14 and 75 in Lessing (1962 [1767–68]) 38–9 and 179.
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108 What Was Tragedy?

By the time August Wilhelm Schlegel delivered his Lectures on Dramatic Art in
1808, that conversation had decisively changed. “Why does Tragedy select subjects
so awfully repugnant to the wishes and the wants of our sensuous nature?” he
asked. Not because, as Hobbes suggested, we reflect on our own security, for “when
we take a warm interest in the persons of a tragedy, we cease to think of ourselves.”
Not because we feel morally improved by a demonstration of poetic justice, for he
who could benefit from such “dreadful examples” must “be conscious of a base
feeling of depression.” Not because of cathartic relief, “for commentators have
never been able to agree as to the meaning of this proposition.” And although it is
true, as some have alleged, that we crave “some violent agitation to rouse us out of
the torpor of our every-day life,” that craving is equally responsible for the gladia-
torial shows of the Romans. “Must we, less indurated and more inclined to tender
feelings, require demi-gods and heroes to descend, like so many desperate gladi-
ators, into the bloody arena of the tragic stage, in order to agitate our nerves by the
spectacle of their sufferings?” Schlegel’s resounding answer is, “No.” The “true
reason, therefore, why tragedy need not shun even the harshest subject is, that
a spiritual and invisible power can only be measured by the opposition which it
­encounters from some external force capable of being appreciated by the senses.
The moral freedom of man, therefore, can only be displayed in a conflict with his
sensuous impulses.” Referring the reader to Kant’s Critique of Judgment to learn
more about “everything connected with this point,” Schlegel breaks decisively with
the early modern poetics of tragedy that has been the subject of this chapter.169 We
now turn to sub-species of tragedy that were rejected or radically redefined by this
new philosophy of the tragic.

169 Schlegel (1846) 67–9.

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PA RT I I
T H E WO R L D W E H AV E L O S T
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3
Simple Pathetic Tragedy

If renaissance humanists had not rediscovered Aristotle’s description of the simple,

pathetic tragedy, they might have been forced to invent it. Relying on a single,
continuous action that proceeds to its catastrophe without surprises, this tragic
species foregoes recognitions and unforeseen reversals of fortune in order to exer-
cise the passions of the audience through pure displays of pathos. I begin with this
species because the theory that underwrites it and the creative practices that con-
tribute to it reveal the gulf that separates the early modern poetics of tragedy from
the idealist philosophy of the tragic. For whereas the former identifies the essence
of tragedy with pathos, the latter is committed to distinguishing the tragic from the
“merely pathetic.”
Only one ancient tragedy that survives is securely identified by Aristotle’s Poetics
as a simple pathetic tragedy: Sophocles’ Ajax. But the Ajax was perceived to bear a
family resemblance to Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Euripides’ Alcestis, and Seneca’s Her-
cules on Mount Oeta, and it was routinely contrasted with plays whose intrigues
were complex, such as Oedipus the Tyrant and Iphigenia among the Taurians. In this
chapter, I focus on a series of early modern tragedies that are profoundly engaged
with the Attic models in the first list: Gian Giorgio Trissino’s Sofonisba (1515), Jean
Racine’s Bérénice (1671), John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), Christoph Willibald
Gluck’s tragédie en musique Alceste (Paris, 1776), and Jean François La Harpe’s
declaimed tragedy Philoctète (1781).
The diversity of these plays underlines the fact that both the suffering of aban-
doned queens and the pain of defeated warriors can furnish the matter of a simple
pathetic tragedy. As Charles Batteux, chair of Greek and Roman philosophy at
the Collège de France, observed of the deserted Adriadne and the wounded and
abandoned Philoctetes, “both are really tragical, because either situation is fully as
­deplorable as death; and conveys the most dreadful ideas of grief, despair, dejec-
tion, and, in short, of every ill that can attend the human heart, all centered in one
person.”1 The chronological span of these tragedies also invites us to consider the
ideological inflections of the simple pathetic tragedy at key points in time: at the
rebirth of tragedy in the Renaissance; at a high-point of early modern tragedy,
when Racine and Milton used it to demonstrate the shortcomings of their own
native theaters; and in the late eighteenth century, when the simple pathetic tra-
gedy became embroiled in contemporary quarrels between the Ancients and the

1 Batteux (1761) 2: 278.

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112 What Was Tragedy?

Moderns, bourgeois drama and French classical tragedy, the lyric and the declaimed
stage, Shakespeare and Racine.
However much the simple pathetic tragedy may be redefined in each of these
moments, certain claims about its distinctive characteristics and appeal persist. It
is more natural and more verisimilar than the complex tragedy, say its proponents,
because it is less contrived. It must compensate for its dearth of intrigue by means
of its just imitations of the passions and its effective use of discourse or tableaux.
Because it does not ask audiences to connect the present to the past and the future
through a chain of causes and effects, it has the power to absorb them in the
­moment. It cultivates a protracted inquietude rather than seeking out the ephem-
eral effects of surprise. And as a result, it exploits dramatic effects—such as rituals,
monologues, and tableaux—that make time stand still. It is also invested in a
particular account of tragic pleasure. In his ground-breaking commentary on
Aristotle’s Poetics, Francesco Robortello appealed to the Rhetoric (1370b) in order
to explain what pleasure Aristotle may have considered proper to tragedy: “Simi-
larly there is an element of pleasure even in mourning and lamentation for the
departed. There is grief, indeed, at his loss, but pleasure in remembering him and
as it were seeing him before us in his deeds and in his life.”2
By the nineteenth century, we shall find, the Ajax and Philoctetes could no longer
be interpreted as simple displays of pathos because the new philosophy of the tragic
demanded that tragedies reveal the moral liberty of mankind. But before we hasten
to the demise of a species, let us return to its origins.

CLASSICAL EXEMPLARS

Ajax
However they explain the rationale behind Aristotle’s tragic species, all early
modern commentators agree that a simple pathetic tragedy should look like one of
the Ajax plays named in the Poetics. Although these may have been numerous in
antiquity, only Sophocles’ has survived. Based on an episode from The Little Iliad,
it dramatizes the events that follow from the decision of the Greek camp to award
the arms of Achilles to Odysseus.3 Enraged by the slight to his own valor, Ajax
sets out in the dark of night to torment and kill Agamemnon, Menelaus, and
Odysseus, but he is deluded by Athena into slaughtering livestock instead. His
frenzy is so intense that his concubine Tecmessa hides their son (ll. 531–6) lest he
wreak slaughter on his own offspring as Heracles once did in a fit of madness.
The play opens the morning after these events, with Odysseus following the
tracks of Ajax to his tent, where Athena conceals him so that he may enjoy the
sight of his rival’s shame. “Is not laughing at one’s enemies the most delightful kind
of laughter?” asks Athena [o–jotm cåkx| údi|so| eÆ| évhqoÀ| cekm; l. 79], invoking

2 Robortello (1548) 150.

3 On sources and variants, see Jebb (1896) 7: xii–xvii, xix–xxiii, xlvii–xlix.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 113

the heroic code that one should help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies.4 As an
invisible spectator beholding the woe of another, Odysseus occupies the position
of the audience, whence he rejects this code in favor of philanthropy: “I pity him
in his misery [époijs¨qx då mim / d�rsgmom ìlpa|], though he is my enemy, because
he is bound fast by a cruel affliction, not thinking of his fate, but of my own; because
I see that all of us who live are nothing but ghosts, or a fleeting shadow” (ll. 121–6).5
The effect of this “noble pity,” observes La Harpe, the dramatist with whom we
shall end this chapter, is to convey the humiliating misery of madness without
making Ajax risible.6
The first quarter of the play is occupied with the events of the night before.
Odysseus patches together an uncertain story on the basis of physical evidence
and eye-witness accounts. Athena then delivers an authoritative narrative from
her own divine perspective, casting Ajax as the unwitting actor in a cruel farce of her
own devising: “I . . . urged . . . him on and drove him into a cruel trap” (l. 60); “Do
you see, Odysseus, how great is the power of the gods?” (l. 118). Ajax’s concubine
Tecmessa then tells her version of events from the point of view of a vulnerable and
uncomprehending member of his household who feels his sufferings as if they were
her own.7 She reports that although his madness was as bad as death (ll. 214–17),
the recovery of his wits is yet worse, “for to look upon one’s own calamities, when
no other has had a hand in them, lays before one grievous agonies” (ll. 260–3). At
least while he was sick, he took pleasure in his troubles and only caused grief for
his family, but now that he is conscious of his actions, “he is utterly afflicted with
sore grief, and we likewise, no less than before” (ll. 274–7; trans. Jebb). It is at this
point, when Ajax “falls into a despair worthy of a hero who has debased himself,”
says La Harpe, that his role becomes “pathetic and theatrical,” for the “dolor” of
Ajax now “profoundly interests us.”8
As he hides in his own hut, Ajax gives vent to the womanish cries and lamenta-
tions that alarm Tecmessa because “he always used to teach that such weeping was
the mark of a cowardly and spiritless man; but he would groan like a bellowing
bull, with no sound of high-pitched wailings [jxjtlsxm]” (ll. 319–22). As the
tragedy unfolds, however, these linguistic symptoms of weakness are transformed
into marks of distinction, setting Ajax above and apart from his interlocutors.9 His
voice is so important a part of his identity in this play that he is heard, as Racine
notes in his copy of the play, before he is ever seen.10 Singing off-stage in the

4 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are from Sophocles (1994–), cited parenthetically in the
text. For the Greek text, I follow Jebb (1896). On this aspect of the heroic code, see Blundell (1989)
26–105.
5 On the Greek notion of philanthropy, see Konstan (2001); on this passage, see Goldhill (2012)
41–2.
6 La Harpe (1799–1805) 2: 11–12.
7 On these shifting perspectives, see Charles Segal (1995) 16–20.
8 La Harpe (1799–1805) 2: 13.
9 See Nooter (2012) 31–55.
10 Racine’s annotations on the Ajax survive in two editions, those of Aldo Manuzio (Venice, 1505)
and Adrien Turnèbe (Paris, 1553). These are reprinted in Racine (1952) 841–2, 853–61, henceforth
cited parenthetically by publisher and line number. For discussions of Racine’s annotations in general,
see Knight (1950) 207–24; Stewart (1965); and Maskell (1991) 191–4.
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114 What Was Tragedy?

dochmaics that tragedy reserves for expressing the most harrowing emotional agi-
tation, he addresses himself, his son, and his absent brother Teucer.11 Only then is
he revealed on the ekkuklēma, sitting among the slaughtered cattle. He engages in
a long dialogue with Tecmessa and the chorus, which culminates in an extended,
pathetic lament that, commencing with apostrophes to Hades and to the land-
scape around him, reaches a climax as he lets out sighs that play on the sound of
his own name: “Alas! [aÆa¥] Who ever would have thought that my name would
come to harmonize with my sorrows? For now I can say ‘Alas’ a second time and
a third” (ll. 430–3). Instances of wit—such as Ajax’s play on his own name—were
suspect to early modern critics because they doubted that persons in the grip
of passion would indulge in them, but Lessing, for one, argued from historical
examples that deep pain could find vent in wit.12 Ajax’s lyrical mode sets him apart
from the chorus and Tecmessa, who remain grounded in iambic trimeter. As a result,
concludes Sarah Nooter, “his lamentation [is] less effective as a communal exchange
of grief than as a lyrical soliloquy.”13
Having given vent to his sorrows, Ajax reviews his options. He cannot return
home to his father without the prize of victory. He cannot attack Troy single-
handed and perish in the attempt, for that would only gladden Agamemnon and
Menelaus. He must take some other action that will prove he is no coward. “No
one shall say that the words [kæcom] you have spoken are another’s, Ajax; they come
from your own mind” (ll. 481–2), respond the chorus. Nevertheless, they and
Tecmessa abjure him to remember his obligations to the living and to pity them.
As Racine’s notes indicate, Ajax’s rough and peremptory response to Tecmessa’s
“tender discourse” asks to be read against Hector’s gentler departure from his wife
in the Iliad (Turnèbe ll. 485, 501). “I think you are a fool,” says Ajax, “if you mean
now to try to educate my character [lËq loi doje¥| fiqome¥m, / eÆ soÃløm üho|
qsi pade�eim moe¥|]” (ll. 594–5). When Ajax withdraws into his tent and Tec-
messa and their son exit, the chorus remain on stage to sing an ode in which they
express no doubt that Ajax is still beset by a god-sent madness that seems incurable
(ll. 609–11). In their second strophe, as they imagine the grief that his mother will
feel at the news that he “hath been stricken with the spirit’s ruin [fiqemolæqx|],”
their immediate grief and her imagined sorrow, their ode and her lament converge
in the image of her singing a dirge not in the plaintive note of the nightingale but
in “shrill-toned strains,” striking her breasts with her hands, and tearing her white
hair (ll. 621–34; trans. Jebb).14
This choral ode vividly imagines the effect that Ajax’s actions will have on his
family and friends, and when he emerges from his tent again, the chorus might be
forgiven for hoping that his thoughts have been running in a common direction.
11 Korzeniewski (1961) 193–7; Garvie, ed. (1998) 158; Hall (2002) 6; Nooter (2012) 37.
12 Worvill (2005) 156–8.    13 Nooter (2012) 39.
14 In their second strophe, the chorus refer to three forms of lamentation: the Linos dirge, the
mourning song of the nightingale, and “shrill-toned” odes with beating of the breasts and tearing of
the hair. It is not clear whether the mother’s dirge is compared to all three (as Lloyd-Jones renders it);
compared to the first and last but contrasted with the melancholy note of the nightingale (as Jebb
prefers); or contrasted with the first two and compared only to shrill-toned odes. See Stanford, ed.
(1963) on ll. 628–31 for a full discussion.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 115

Indeed, he seems to yield, saying in softened tones, and in an artfully ambiguous

speech, that he is going to the beach to purify himself (ll. 646–92). “Ajax deceives
the chorus and pretends to wish to live,” writes Racine (Aldo l. 646; cf. Turnèbe
l. 648). Yet Ajax’s intent to dissemble does not detract from the nobility of his
lyricism as he employs compound adjectives and appeals to the universal processes
of nature:15
Why, the most formidable and the most powerful of things bow to office; winter’s
snowy storms make way before summer with its fruits, and night’s dread circle moves
aside for day drawn by white horses to make her lights blaze; and the blast of fearful
winds lulls to rest the groaning sea, and all powerful Sleep releases those whom he has
bound, nor does he hold his prisoners forever. (ll. 669–76)
However misleading Ajax’s words may be, his assent to the order of things seems
genuine. Indeed, as Nooter observes, his speech has the quality of a thrênos, not an
expression of despair and grief but an instrument of consolation and instruction.16
Ajax’s half-brother Teucer finally returns to the Greek camp from a military
foray only to be threatened with death by an irate army. Warned by the prophet
Calchas that something dire may happen to his brother, he sends a messenger to
forestall Ajax, but it is too late. In a piece of stage-craft that Racine especially ad-
mired, Tecmessa and the chorus exit in quest of Ajax so that he might re-enter the
theater, utter his parting words in solitude, and kill himself in plain view of the
spectators (Turnèbe ll. 812–18). Whereas a Greek scholiast and Corneille had both
interpreted this as a change of scene, Racine prefers to see it as a clever use of exits
and entrances that preserves the illusion of a unity of place. However that may be,
Ajax addresses prayers and invocations to Zeus, Hermes, the Furies, Helios and
Death. As he lingers on the prospect of his parents’ grief, he seems to bring his
­soliloquy to a hasty conclusion, “But no good is done by futile lamentation! I must
begin the action with some speed! [kk$ oÃdçm ìqcom sa’sa hqgme¥rhai lsgm, / kk$
qjsåom sø pqcla rÀm svei sim¨]” (ll. 852–3). It speaks volumes about what
separates the seventeenth-century reception of Sophocles from the post-Kantian
reception that Racine notes with care each deity whom Ajax addresses and the
effect that news of his death will have on his parents (Turnèbe ll. 824–51). He
remarks as well when Ajax starts up again where he left off, with the pathetic repe-
tition of Death’s name: “È hmase hmase” (Turnèbe l. 854). But he passes over in
silence the very utterance that post-Kantian critics consider essential—what makes
Ajax’s suicide a volitional activity worthy of a tragic hero: “Now for the deed,” as
Jebb renders it, “as quickly as I may” (l. 853).
As Ajax bids farewell to the light, to his own land Salamis, to Athens, and the
streams and rivers and plains of Troy, he dilates the moment of death into a process
of dying, a rite of passage, and in doing so he converts the audience into a commu-
nity of mourners who, like the dying, occupy a liminoid space between the living

15 For a useful review of the critical controversy over Ajax’s “deception” speech (with extensive
bibliography), see Charles Segal (1995) 432–3 n. 9; also see Blundell (1989) 82–8. On the poetic
quality of the speech, see Richard Buxton (2006) and Lardinois (2006).
16 Nooter (2012) 43.
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116 What Was Tragedy?

and the dead. La Harpe confesses that this monologue would be too long by
modern standards, but he argues that for the Greeks dying words were almost
sacrosanct; besides, the strength of the Greeks was the imagination, not reason. For
them, the woods and streams evoked ideas that were not purely physical.17
Tecmessa’s discovery of the body as she enters the scene from the audience’s
left—blood still spurting from its nostrils and gore issuing from the wound—
elicits the heartfelt cry, “He must not be looked upon!” (l. 915). Once she has
covered the corpse, she mourns in dialogue with the chorus, exclaiming, in verses
commended by Racine, “Unhappy Ajax, being such a man, you end up in such
a state [o∂o| Âm o≤x| ìvei|], how deserving of lamentation even among enemies”
(ll. 923–4; my trans.). The scene is then brought to a crescendo when Teucer
­beholds the covered body, exclaiming, “O most grievous of all the sights that my
eyes have looked upon!” (ll. 992–3). Teucer’s adherence to iambic trimeter sig-
nals his stolid determination to remain rational, but his emphatics, superlatives,
and recurrent x’s undermine that determination, producing an overwhelming
resonance of mourning that is the more moving for the resistance it overcomes
(ll. 992–7). As Stanford observes, Sophocles “pulls out all the organ-stops of
pathos, like an organist at the climax of a fugue.”18 Then, having allowed Teucer’s
grief to run its discursive course, Sophocles renews it by means of spectacle. Even
the veiled body of Ajax was enough to stun Teucer. Now in another passage that
Racine picks out, he asks that Tecmessa remove the shroud so that he might see
the whole horror (ll. 1003–4).
The last third of the play worries over the significance of Ajax’s actions and his
legacy, for if Ajax was worshiped as a hero in Athens, it was not clear what place
such a man could occupy in contemporary Athenian society. Since the twentieth-
century, classicists have been particularly interested in the political resonance of
these debates.19 Racine, on the other hand, focuses on Sophocles’ stage-craft and
his management of the passions. “This is tremendously tender and tremendously
noble,” he comments of the tableau created when Teucer commands Eurysaces
to clasp the corpse of his father, holding locks of hair in supplication (Turnèbe
l. 1171). La Harpe concurs. “Let us transport ourselves back to an age so different
from ours, and let us see if this is not a touching spectacle” that would appear beau-
tiful if painted on a canvas, and why less so in the theater? “Let us confess that this
religion was poetic and theatrical.”20
Odysseus’s intercession on behalf of Ajax, which finally resolves the impasse that
Teucer and the sons of Atreus have reached, is essential to the play’s acknowledgment
that the heroism of a bygone age has been replaced by capacities, such as moral
flexibility and cultivated sympathy, that have their own ethical value. “Have you
such respect for the corpse of an enemy?” asks Agamemnon (l. 1356). Odysseus,

17 La Harpe (1799–1805) 2: 17–18.

18 Stanford, ed. (1963) commenting on ll. 992–7 and in turn developing the commentary on
l. 992 in Kamerbeek (1953).
19 See, for example, Bowra (1944) 16–52; Winnington–Ingram (1980) 12–17, 62; Charles Segal
(1999) 110, 339; and Goldhill (1990b).
20 La Harpe (1799–1804) 2: 19.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 117

with the air of a philosopher, responds, “His excellence [qesñ] weighs more with
me than his enmity” (ll. 1357). Then he puts himself in the dead hero’s place, as
tragedy ever instructs us to do: “Why, I myself shall come to this pass [ja≠ cq
aÃsø| émhd$ ≤nolai]” (l. 1365).

Philoctetes
Although the Ajax is no longer among the handful of texts that stand in for the
whole of Attic tragedy on the typical college syllabus, it was Sophocles’ most
popular and most frequently quoted play in antiquity, and for that very reason it
enjoyed a high reputation in the early modern period.21 Early modern readers
often link it with another of Sophocles’ plays, the Philoctetes (409 bc), which, des-
pite being written as much as four decades later, continues some of the narrative
matter and themes of the Ajax in a fable whose simple intrigue invited comparison
with the earlier tragedy. In both plays, a warrior who is imagined to be the last link
to an archaic heroic ēthos exemplified by Heracles and Achilles is done an apparent
injustice by the leaders of the Greek army; as a result, he suffers grievous and alien-
ating mental and physical anguish; and the persons around him debate within
themselves and with each other what society owes to an individual of evident
­excellence, if unbending temperament, and what he owes to his leaders, his rela-
tions (philoi), and his fellow Greeks.
The Philoctetes is set on Lemnos, the island on which Odysseus and the Argives
abandoned its hero, leaving him to endure pain and hunger among wild beasts
with no one but Echo to respond to his bitter cries of lamentation (ll. 180–90).22
They took such drastic action because, on the journey to Troy, Philoctetes led the
Greek expedition to the shrine of Chrysè, whose location he knew from an earlier
visit with his friend Heracles. There he was bitten by a snake. His wound would
not heal, he could not contain his cries of pain, even during religious ceremonies,
and the stench of his infection was insupportable. But now the Argives have been
informed by the Trojan prisoner and prophet Helenus that Troy will fall only to the
joint efforts of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus and the arrows of Philoctetes. The oracle
is repeated and interpreted variously by Odysseus, the chorus, and Neoptolemus.23
Is it sufficient, as Odysseus persuades himself, to bring Philoctetes to Troy by guile
or force or even, failing that, to commandeer the bow of Heracles for his own use?
Or does the fulfillment of the prophecy depend, as Neoptolemus comes to believe,
on Philoctetes being persuaded to voyage to Troy? Can Philoctetes be treated as a
mere instrument, or must he be respected as an end in himself ?
The pathos of Philoctetes is unfolded carefully and by degrees. Sophocles first
makes use of stage properties—a bed of leaves, a wooden cup, and gore-stained

21 Stanford, ed. (1963) App. A.

22 Major interpretations of the play include Bowra (1944) 261–306; Knox (1964) 117–42; Easterling
(1978); Winnington-Ingram (1980) 280–303; Charles Segal (1999) 292–361 and (1995) 95–118;
Blundell (1989) 184–225; D. Roberts (1989); Ringer (1998) 101–26; Hesk (2000) 188–201; Nooter
(2012) 124–46; and Goldhill (2012) esp. 32–5, 42–7, 63–73, 119–31.
23 Jebb (1896) 4: xii–xx; Hoppin (1981) 3–9.
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118 What Was Tragedy?

rags—to suggest the misery of the outcast. Neoptolemus then tells the chorus what
sort of life Philoctetes is reported to lead, hunting wild beasts “painfully in his pain
[rltceqøm rltceq›|]” (l. 166), with none drawing near to heal his afflictions.24
The approach of Philoctetes is announced by cries of pain that begin as a mere din
but resolve into a distinct genre: “he clearly sings a dirge [dirgla hqgme¥]” (l. 209;
my trans.).25 What Neoptolemus knows only by report, he now hears first hand.
“When I looked all around me,” says Philoctetes of his abandonment, “I could find
nothing present but pain [jlmomsi rtkkboiso· pmsa dç rjopËm / gŒqirjom
oÃdçm pkóm mirhai paqæm]” (ll. 282–3). The persons of the play can compare him
to only two paragons of suffering: Ixion, who was bound and placed on a r­ evolving
wheel, and Heracles, who, in another tragedy that is often cited as an example of
the simple pathetic species, immolated himself with the help of Philoctetes rather
than endure the agony caused by a poisoned shirt.
Until mid-way through the play, we must rely on stage properties, report, the
imagination of the stage persons, and first-person narrative to form an idea of this
suffering. But when Philoctetes is felled by a paroxysm, we encounter his pain
without even the mediation of language. Sophocles’ attempt to render inarticulate
groans in Greek is simply untranslatable: “   ” (l. 732), “pap pap pap
papa¥” (l. 746), “pappapappapa¥” (l. 754). The suffering is “grievous [deimøm] . . . ,
and indescribable!” (l. 756). Devoured by agony, Philoctetes begs Neoptolemus
to lop off his heel with a sword (ll. 747–9). He enjoins the boy to burn him as
he himself once burned Heracles (ll. 799–804). He even implores the earth to
receive him in death (ll. 819–20). The unconscious Philoctetes, who has by this
time entrusted his weapons to the safekeeping of Neoptolemus, remains on stage
as mute evidence of the vulnerability of the human body. No wonder Plutarch
invoked this theatrical role when asking why, although “we avoid a diseased and
ulcerous person as an unpleasant sight,” we “take delight in seeing Aristophon’s
Philoctetes and Silanion’s Jocasta, who are represented on the stage as pining
away or dying” (How to Study Poetry 18C), thus posing a question that entered the
mainstream of renaissance dramatic theory as early as Giovan Battista Giraldi’s
1554 Discourses on the Composition of Romance, Comedies, and Tragedies (Discorsi . . .
intorno al comporre de i romanzi, delle comedie, e delle tragedie), in which he uses it
as evidence that the ancients did present the spectacle of suffering on stage (rather
than simply reporting it).26 Indeed, the Philoctetes tests the limits of our capacity
to endure such artful imitations. Yet it also advances an implicit defense of the
instructive value of theatrical pathos, for Neoptolemus’ ethical formation depends
on his exposure to suffering in all its unsettling power. If he is misled by the sophistry
of Odysseus, he is rehabilitated by strong emotion: pity and empathy, friendship,
and shame force him to reconsider the means and ends of his mission. Working

24 Here I follow the Greek in Lloyd-Jones rather than Jebb, who prints rstceøm rstceq|, “all
wretched that he is.” In his notes, Jebb gives reasons for rejecting Brunk’s attractive conjecture (printed
by Lloyd-Jones).
25 Here again I follow the Greek in Sophocles (1994–). Jebb (1896) gives dirgla cq hqoe¥, “its
accents are too clear.” See Kamerbeek (1953) 6: 53; Nooter (2012) 126–7.
26 Plutarch (1927), trans. Babbitt; Giraldi (2002 [1554]) 242–4.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 119

beneath the surface, they ultimately lead Neoptolemus to an unsuspected answer

to his question, What am I to do?
The transformation that Neoptolemus experiences depends upon more than
disinterested pity. After all, the chorus express their pity for Philoctetes before he
even appears on stage (ll. 169–77), yet they remain prepared to seize his bow by
means of deceit or force. Nine years on Lemnos—during which time strangers
have pitied Philoctetes but abandoned him—suggest that a benevolence that is
not reinforced by ties of friendship (fiik¨a) is insufficient to counter the pain and
inconvenience that Philoctetes’ disease imposes on those around him. Neoptolemus
begins to feel those ties developing when the old warrior expresses grief at the news
of Achilles’ death with a spontaneity that threatens to throw Neoptolemus off his
script (ll. 336–7).27 We cannot know for sure in this episode whether the pity and
friendship that Neoptolemus appears to feel are genuine, but when he declares
Philoctetes’ agony “grievous [deimæm]” (l. 755), and Philoctetes confirms the word,
we sense that they are beset by a common perturbation and that Neoptolemus is
being honest when he confesses, “I have been in pain long since, lamenting for
your woes” (l. 806). Neoptolemus’ harrowing identification with Philoctetes leads
to a crucial intellectual clarification: that the god has bid the Greeks to bring the
man to Troy, not just the bow (ll. 839–42).
When Philoctetes awakens from his stupor, wondering that Neoptolemus should
“have endured to wait with pity [ékeimË|] throughout my suffering [pñlasa]”
(ll. 869–71), it becomes apparent that Neoptolemus is enduring his own mental
agony. As he wonders what he is to do next, he finally reveals his secret purpose to
Philoctetes in a discharge of shame. Philoctetes’ denunciation leaves the young
man as speechless with moral agony as the old hero was speechless with pain before
his collapse on stage (l. 951).28 “As for me,” the young man confides to the chorus
in an aside, “a strange pity for this man has fallen upon me, not now for the first
time, but since long ago [élo≠ lçm oµjso| deimø| élpåpsxjå si| / so’d$ mdqø| oÃ
m’m pqËsom, kk ja≠ pkai]” (ll. 965–6). Odysseus’ sudden entrance forestalls
Neoptolemus from arriving at any resolution, however, and he leaves Philoctetes
alone with the chorus to reconsider his position—only to re-enter abruptly pur-
sued by an anxious Odysseus. This is a brilliant example, as Simon Goldhill dem-
onstrates, of Sophocles’ use of entrances and exits to represent spiritual movements:
Neoptolemus intends to undo (k�rxm) all the mistakes he made before (l. 1224).29
When Neoptolemus finds that his efforts at persuasion are met only with suspicion
and curses, he returns the bow. Praising this stage business as “a noble and tender”
“tableau of nature,” La Harpe exclaims, “With what pleasure” do we watch “a
young man return to his character . . . and yield to pity after having yielded to
politics!”30
Even after this significant gesture, which earns Neoptolemus the right to chide
his companion that those who inflict injury on themselves do not deserve pity

27 Bowra (1944) 275.

28 Winnington-Ingram (1980) 288; Carlevale (2000) 46.
29 Goldhill (2012) 32.    30 La Harpe (1799–1804) 2: 88.
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120 What Was Tragedy?

(ll. 1314–47), Philoctetes will not bend. We might say that his obstinacy is a
mark of his nobility and integrity: He is so opposed to furthering the ambition
of men whom he considers vile that he is prepared to go unhealed rather than
abet their enterprise.31 But the play also suggests that Philoctetes may have
grown too accustomed to playing the role of the suffering and polluted outcast
to be reintegrated into society. “Let me bear the sufferings that are my portion
[ìa le prveim sa’h$ peq pahe¥m]” (l. 1397; trans. Jebb), he concludes before
insisting that Neoptolemus keep his word to take him home. Neoptolemus’ great
action is to agree, thus placing the claims of friendship and fidelity to his own
nature before what he can only understand as his chance to change the course of
history and to win lasting glory (jkåo|) by taking Troy.32 Speaking in slow tetra-
meters, the two comrades limp toward the ship (ll. 1402–8). Tycho von Wilamowitz
remarked trenchantly before going to his own death in World War I that their
choice was tantamount to desertion.33
By this time, the human agents have created so many obstacles to the plan of the
gods that Heracles, the erstwhile friend and mentor of Philoctetes, must appear
from a machine to untie the knot. In his deified form, he demonstrates that suf-
fering may be transfigured into glory. Speaking in imperatives and future second
persons that brook no disagreement, he declares it to be Zeus’ will that Philoctetes
go to Troy. There he will be cured, and he and Neoptolemus will conquer Troy
(ll. 1409–44). Heracles’ prophecies (which, as muthoi, are distinguished from the
specious logoi of Odysseus) are enough to persuade Philoctetes to obey his old
friend.34 Philoctetes’ beautiful leave-taking, which transforms an island that once
served only as an echo-chamber for his pained cries into a landscape of natural
beauty inhabited by deities suggests that the discarded warrior is already experien-
cing a spiritual renovation.35

Alcestis
Euripides’ Alcestis (438 bc) stands in a more complex relation to the simple pathetic
species because its resolution depends on the wondrous recognition and reversal
we might expect of a romantic tragicomedy; and indeed, we find Shakespeare
playing variations on it in Much Ado About Nothing and The Winter’s Tale.36 But
Euripides’ ability to make mourning dramatic appealed deeply to playwrights
writing simple pathetic tragedies as well.
In the prologue to the tragedy, Apollo explains that he rescued Admetus from
immediate death by persuading the Fates to accept a substitute, but only the wife

31 Charles Segal (1999) 356.    32 Bowra (1944) 299–300.

33 T. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1917) 280; Lloyd-Jones (1972) 214.
34 D. B. Robinson (1969) 53; Easterling (1978) 35–9; Winnington-Ingram (1980) 299–302;
Charles Segal (1999) 337; Hoppin (1981) 19–20, 27–30.
35 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) 175.
36 Alcestis is often described as being written in a mixed or experimental genre. For the critical con-
troversy this has occasioned, see Wesley Smith (1960); John Wilson, ed. (1968); Ritoók (1977); Foley
(1985); Michelini (1987) 324–9; Charles Segal (1993) ch. 3. L. P. E. Parker, ed. (2007) xxi reaffirms
the play’s status as a tragedy.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 121

of the king volunteered. Although Apollo confidently predicts her rescue in his
testy exchange with Death, the theater is immediately thrown into a mood of dol-
orous expectation when a chorus of the men of Pherae enter in anticipation of
Alcestis’ death.37 Wishing to see the sun for the last time, she appears outside to
sing apostrophes to it, the land, and her marriage bed before painting a vivid image
of the approach of Charon. Then she makes her last requests. At her death, her child
sings a lament whose periodic dochmaics and affective text repetitions express his
extreme distress. As L. P. E. Parker reminds us, it “must have been strangely impres-
sive” to hear a boy’s voice in the Attic theater, where the only voices normally heard
were those of grown men.38 Admetus feels compelled to conceal the cause of his
grief when Heracles enters seeking hospitality, but a manservant eventually reveals
the secret, and Heracles resolves to waylay death. In the play’s brilliant concluding
scene the hero presents Admetus with a veiled woman who bears an uncanny
­resemblance to Alcestis and insists that he bring her into his house; only when
Admetus yields—with the awkward implication that his loyalty to his dead wife
may be less than resolute—is the woman unveiled as Alcestis.
Early modern readers responded powerfully to Alcestis’ sacrifice.39 As François
Fénelon writes, “Plato cites the example of Alcestis, who dies to make her spouse
live. That, according to Plato, is what makes man a god—preferring the other,
through love, to oneself, to the point of forgetting oneself, sacrificing oneself,
counting oneself as nothing.”40 As dramatists, they also emulated the play’s dila-
tion of death into a stately progress in which the dying and the mourning join in
grief. The process begins when the chorus divide into one group that believes
that Alcestis is already dead and another that believes that she is yet to die. Their
uncertainty is only maintained when a maidservant reports, “You might call her
both living and dead” (l. 141).41 She then recounts the ceremonious way in which
Alcestis has been treating herself proleptically as a corpse to be readied for burial:
bathing her fair skin, dressing in finery, placing garlands on all the altars of the
house, laying herself on her marriage bed. Both Alcestis and Admetus refer to her
as if she were lingering in a betwixt and between state, neither living nor fully dead.
“No more existing, such you can call me now” (l. 387), she says to her husband.
“She is and is no more. It is a grief to me” (l. 521), says Admetus to Heracles as he
equivocates. Even after Alcestis is dead, Admetus refers to her as if she were in a
state of transition (“bid the dead woman farewell as she goes out on her last
journey”; ll. 609–10), and her survivors speak as if they were not themselves fully
alive. “We are all dead, not she alone,” says the manservant (1. 825; trans. Parker).
The liminoid existence of Admetus, who confesses that he envies the dead, desiring
passionately to dwell with them (ll. 866–7, 895–9), is epitomized by his hesitation

37 On the theme of death in the play, see Rosenmeyer (1963); Musurillo (1972); Justina Gregory
(1979); Charles Segal (1993) chs. 2–4.
38 L. P. E. Parker, ed. (2007) 130.
39 On the ways in which Alcestis, as a model of excellence, is designed to meet male needs, see
Rabinowitz (1993) ch. 2.
40 “Sur la pur amour” in Fénelon (1983) 1: 667.
41 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are from Euripides (1994–2003), trans. Kovacs.
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122 What Was Tragedy?

before the door to his house: If he enters, the grief and desolation of his children
and slaves will drive him outdoors, but outside, the weddings of Thessalians and
gatherings of women will drive him back in. As a man who has vowed to mourn
perpetually, he is caught on the threshold between life and death. Other aspects
of Alcestis could not be assimilated to modern tastes. Indeed, the agon between
Admetus and his father (who staunchly refuses to die for his son) could be said,
with little exaggeration, to have sparked the Quarrel of the Ancients and Mod-
erns.42 But the play’s dramaturgy of mourning would prove profoundly generative.
Writing in the wake of that quarrel, the Jesuit taste-maker Pierre Brumoy conceded
the gulf that divided ancient from modern customs, but he insisted on the power
of Alcestis (“which has been one of the least spared of any in our days”) to bridge it:
“if Euripides in this work paints well to me nature; if he calls up my sensibility in
the tenderness of a wife who dies voluntarily for her husband; . . . If I become an
Athenian as much as those whom the poet intended to entertain, . . . I cannot avoid,
notwithstanding some faults that the pit and I perceive, to join my applause to the
acclamations of the Grecian assembly.”43

R E C OV E RY A N D I N V E N T I O N : T R I S S I N O ’ S
SOFONISBA (1515)

Sofonisba (1515) dramatizes a minor episode of the Punic Wars recorded by Livy
and Appius and amplified in Petrarch’s Africa into an erotic digression like Aeneas’
courtship of Dido. When Trissino transformed this digression into the first regular
tragedy of the Renaissance, he may have been guided by the examples of Sophocles’
Ajax and Euripides’ Alcestis rather than the precepts of the Poetics, for Aristotle’s
text posed real interpretive puzzles until (and long after) Alessandro de’ Pazzi pub-
lished his Greek text and Latin translation of 1536.44 Yet by taking these plays
(rather than, say, Oedipus the Tyrant) as his model, Trissino did in practice make the
simple pathetic species the font and origin of renaissance tragedy. What’s more, the
formal conventions that he pioneered—such as the use of free verse (versi sciolti)
for dialogue and rhyming stanzas (canzone) for choruses—were motivated by the
priority that he placed on imitating and arousing the passions. He explains, for
example, in the letter to Pope Leo X in the first printed edition of his play (1529)
that he chose free verse as “essential for moving pity; for a speech which moves pity
is one born of suffering, and suffering seeks spontaneous expression, and therefore
rhyme, which shows deliberation, is an obstacle to pity.”45
Why did early modern audiences find this play profoundly tragic when in recent
times “many critics and playwrights alike have concluded that the Sophonisba

42 On the agon, see Lloyd (1992) 37–41; on the Quarrel, see Brooks, Norman, and Zarucchi, eds.
(1994); Perrault (1964 [1688–97]); Gillot (1914); De Jean (1997); Décultot (2000) 81–119; Com-
pagnon (2005); and Larry Norman (2011) with further bibliography.
43 “A Discourse upon the Greek Theatre” in Brumoy (1759) 1: vi.
44 On this translation, see Weinberg (1961) 1: 371–3.
45 “To Our Most Holy Lord, Pope Leo X” in Trissino (1997 [1515]) 48.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 123

story, although tempting, does not in reality offer a satisfactory tragic subject”?46
To begin with, whereas modern critics often look for a Hegelian collision, Sofonisba
channels much of its energy into lyric expressions of personal pathos. To Salvatore
di Maria, who assumes that tragedy is “action-based,” Trissino’s Petrarchism is
regrettable because it leads him to dwell on emotions rather than actions and to
accord a value to language that ignores “the necessary correspondence between
words and deeds.”47 But if we recognize Sofonisba for what it is, a simple pathetic
tragedy that relies on imitations of the passions to accomplish its ends, then it
­becomes easy to see why Trissino should mine Petrarch’s rich vein of emotional
description and self-scrutiny. A related objection to Sofonisba runs that when the
persons of the drama do clash on stage, they spar, more often than not, in formal
disputes (agōnes). Yet while modern critics have deplored these scenes, Niccolo Rossi
singles them out for praise in his 1590 Discourse on Tragedy (Discorsi intorno alla
tragedia), citing them as fine examples of rhetorical argument like the agōn in Iphi-
genia in Aulis, when Menelaus and Agamemnon dispute the necessity of sacrificing
Iphigenia. For Rossi, these disputes are just one type of dianoia that Sofonisba uses
to move the audience to pity and fear; others include expressions of passion, the
moving narration of Sofonisba’s death, and the plaints of the chorus and Erminia
(Sofonisba’s companion).48
Because theorists of the passions believed that humans tended to become fixed in
a particular affective state until confronted with some new object or information to
which they could react, Trissino makes use of dreams, entrances, exits, messages, and
formal disputes to force his dramatis personae out of one passion and into ­another.
The passions may be as various as the winds and the tides, but they can nevertheless
be reduced to the four elemental states of mind described by Cicero in his Tusculan
Disputations (4.7): In the presence of an immediate good or evil we feel joy or grief,
while at the prospect of an imagined good or a threatened evil, we feel desire or fear.
Trissino’s dramatic method is to plunge his dramatis personae into one of these elem-
ental states of mind, then to drive them through a series of affective revolutions.
This project begins with the opening lines of the play when, like a Euripidean
maiden, Sofonisba gives vent to her anxieties:
Alas, where shall I direct my speech if not to where my thoughts lead? How else can
I relieve this heavy grief that burdens my heart, if not by revealing my sufferings?
Lassa, dove poss’io voltar la lingua,
se non là ’ve la spinge il mio pensiero?
Che giorno e notte sempre mi molesta.
E come posso disfogare alquanto
questo grave dolor, che ’l cor m’ingombra,
se non manifestando i miei martìri? (ll. 1–6)
After tracing the origins of the Punic Wars back to the deception and desertion
of Dido by Aeneas, she arrives at the present danger: Her husband Siface is com-

46 G. Sharman, “Introduction” in Trissino (1997 [1515]) 24.

47 di Maria (2002) 45.    48 Rossi (1974 [1590]) 4: 99.
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124 What Was Tragedy?

mitted to a battle that she expects him to lose. She then recounts a terrible dream that,
while containing the “knot” of the tragedy (as Torquato Tasso approvingly remarks in
the margins of his copy), merely bewilders the queen and fills her with a nameless
dread.49 She explains that she found herself in a dark wood surrounded by blood-
thirsty dogs. When she begged a shepherd for protection, he shielded her, but nothing
could silence the dogs; so he pointed to the mouth of a cave, saying, “Since I cannot
save you, go inside; they will not be able to take you there [Poi che te salvar non posso,
/ entra costì, che non potran pigliarti]” (ll. 114–15).50
Although Erminia counsels Sofonisba to put away her fear and observes philo-
sophically that the life of no mortal is without grief, Sofonisba (breaking into
rhyming verse that lends her speech all the revelatory intensity of a lyric poem)
insists that neither her reason nor her will can govern her passions, such is their
strength:
I am well aware that we should do as you say, but this overwhelming sorrow is stronger
than I. Feeling rebels against even the best reasoning, promptly weakening the will.
I find myself without the strength to fight against the sorrow that destroys me.
Ben conosch’io che quello
bisognerebbe far, che tu ragioni,
ma il soverchio dolor troppo mi sforza;
e il senso, ch’è rubello
de le più salde e ottime ragioni,
subitamente il lor volere ammorza;
così mi truovo senza alcuna forza
da contrapormi al duol, che mi distrugge. (ll. 166–73)
Just as Erminia suggests that they pray to be released from such fear, the chorus
enter singing an ode whose turn and counter-turn are devoted to terror and the
loss of hope. When Sofonisba’s worst fears are realized in the first episode and
she receives the news of the city’s defeat, the queen becomes an object of pity:
“Who in the world is so devoid of pity that, seeing her now, he could restrain tears?
[Qual spirto al mondo è di pietà sì nudo, / che mirando costei tenesse il pianto?]”
(ll. 296–7). The queen would presumably remain fixed in a state of inconsolable
grief were it not for the entrance of Massinissa, whose gentle words reawaken hope.
She therefore sets fear aside and, falling to her knees, implores his pity. If he can do
nothing else for her, he can at least grant her death. Overcome by her grace, he
promises to do better than that.
If we demand action of our tragedies, we are likely to become impatient with the
play once Massinissa proposes marriage, for Sofonisba’s measure is a stately one.
After the chorus have prayed to all-mighty Love, a servant describes the queen’s
ritual preparations for marriage which, drawn as they are from Alcestis, could as
easily be preparations for burial.51 Then a maidservant emerges from the palace in

49 Trissino and Tasso (1884) 5.

50 Line numbers refer to the text in Gasparini, ed. (1963). My translations.
51 On the echoes of Euripides’ Alcestis, see Ferroni (1980) 184–95; and Valentina Gallo (2005)
19–30.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 125

tears to announce that the queen will soon be dead, and the audience reinterprets
her actions in precisely those terms. As the maidservant reports, Massinissa’s emis-
sary presented the queen with a cup of poison, explaining that, although his master
would gladly have kept his promise to marry her, he could only prevent her from
being delivered to the Romans alive.
If Trissino had followed his historical sources, Sofonisba would have drunk the
poison and died promptly, but he has her place the cup down. Like Alcestis, she
then purifies her limbs, visits the altars of her gods, lies on her marriage bed, and
makes a tearful farewell to her son (who is never mentioned by the Roman histor-
ians). Like Ajax, she wishes that her son may be like his father but enjoy better
fortune. And like the Socrates of the Phaedo (117c–118), she beholds the cup of
poison without a tremor or a blush, drinks it down, and then consoles her friends
as death slowly overtakes her. Sofonisba cries only when she beholds her grieving
son, but her tears of pity elicit such a response from her followers that, we are told,
a stone could not forebear to weep. “This passage,” Tasso observes, “is full of the
most tender commotion, and I feel it at the bottom of my heart.”52
The chorus conclude that it is time to dress in mourning, but Sofonisba’s sudden
appearance to take her leave pre-empts them. Her strength is failing, and she must
be helped to a seat. She hopes that the chorus will be generous with their sighs in
remembering her, and they assure her that they will bathe her tomb with tears,
cover it with cut locks, and decorate it with flowers every year. The chorus let her
sit in majesty for a time, then carry her back to the atrium where they lay out her
corpse and veil her. Like Admetus, Erminia vows to go into perpetual mourning,
eschewing song and musical instruments for tears and sighs. Aristotle’s observation
that the pleasure of grief arises from remembrance may lie behind Erminia’s avowal
that she will cherish her portrait of the queen and hopes to be visited by her
memory in dreams. By dilating the brutal change from life to death into a rite of
passage whose middle terms (dying and mourning) are ritualized, Sofonisba trans-
forms the theater into a house of mourning.53
Trissino always wanted Sofonisba to be performed because he considered theat-
rical spectacle to be an important source of dramatic pleasure; but the production
planned for Pope Leo X’s triumphant return to Florence in 1515 was scuttled,
perhaps because the play’s valorization of liberty was at odds with the pope’s plans
to seize Urbino. The first actress to personate Sofonisba may, therefore, have been
Mary Stuart, who at the age of thirteen performed Melin de Saint-Gelais and
Jacques Amyot’s French translation at the Château de Blois.54 One can only
wonder if Mary remembered her old role when, upon hearing the news that she
was to be executed for treason, she prepared to “perform the last act” of her per-
sonal “tragedy.”55 Like Sofonisba, Mary was feared by her enemies as “the finest she

52 Trissino and Tasso (1884) 31.

53 For a fuller examination of mourning as the source of tragic pleasure, see Hoxby (2010). For
recent accounts of tragedy that stress the centrality of mourning, see Cole (1985) and Taxidou (2004).
54 For details of the performance, see Lebègue (1946).
55 Mary Queen of Scots to Bernardino de Mendoza, from Fotheringhay, November 23 [1586], in
Labanoff, ed. (1884) 6: 459.
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126 What Was Tragedy?

that ever was” because her labile sexuality appeared to exercise an irresistible sway
over potent men who were prepared to stir up political and religious strife at her
behest; and like that dangerous beauty of ancient history, she too transformed her-
self into a figure of marble constancy. In so doing, she joined the common treasury
of pathetic tragedy, becoming a locus of passive suffering in Jean de Bordes’ Jesuit
school play, Mary Stuart, Tragedy (1589), Antoine de Montchrestien’s The Tragedy
of the Queen of Scotland (1601), Joost van den Vondel’s Mary Stuart, or Tortured
Majesty (1646), Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart (1800)—which, written under
the spell of the idealist philosophy of tragic, “corrects” the tradition of pathetic
tragedy—, and Giuseppe Bardari and Gaetano Donizetti’s opera, Maria Stuarda
(1835), which reasserts it. Historians and literary critics have observed how dilated
and ceremonial Mary’s death is even in the earliest prose accounts of her trial and
execution, as if writers on both sides of the quarrel longed for “the moment of her
death never to arrive, or end.”56 That ambivalent desire lies at the heart of the
simple pathetic tragedy’s theatrical power, which relies on dilation, ceremony, and
ritual to produce its pleasurable pain and its painful pleasures.

A T H E O R E T I C A L I N T E R LU D E

In the Poetica that he was writing at the time of his death in 1550, Trissino instances
not just the Ajax but his own Sofonisba in his discussion of the simple pathetic
species of tragedy identified by the Poetics. By 1550, Trissino was not alone in his
efforts to make sense of Aristotle’s puzzling taxonomy.57 Robortello had already
reasoned, for example, that simple tragedies must consist only of pathos.58 Most
careful commentators would eventually conclude that simple tragedies must still
present the change of fortune that Aristotle refers to as a metabasis (Poetics
1452a16), but they believed that the change did not have to take the peculiar form
of a peripeteia, in which actions have an effect that overturns expectations. Thus
when Ajax commits suicide or Polyeucte is arrested, judged, and put to death for
overturning the altars of the pagans, he suffers a change of fortune (metabasis) but
not a reversal (peripeteia) because the change is foreseeable.59
To better imagine what a simple tragedy might look like, humanists could turn
to Aristotle’s confusing assertion that “there are four species of tragedy, for that is
also the number of ‘parts’ that have been discussed”: the complex tragedy, “which
is peripety and recognition throughout”; the pathetic tragedy, “like the Ajax plays
and also the Ixions”; the ethical tragedy, such as “the Women of Pithia and the
Peleus”; and an unnamed fourth species exemplified by “The Daughters of Phorcys

56 Lewis (1998) 14.

57 For earlier discussions of Trissino’s comments on pathetic tragedy, see Ariani (1974) 35–9;
Ferroni (1980) 176–7.
58 Robortello (1548) 116–17.
59 On the distinction between peripeteia and metabasis in the commentaries of Pietro Vettori,
Alessandro Piccolomini, and Paolo Beni, and on the failure of René Le Bossu and André Dacier to
appreciate it, see Twining (1812 [1789]) 2: 74–7.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 127

and also the Prometheus and all the actions in Hades” (Poetics 1455b32–56a4;
trans. Else). This passage, as Gerard Else remarks in his authoritative commentary
of 1967, is “one of the most notorious cruces in the Poetics.”60 It was already recog-
nized as one in the early modern period. After reviewing and adjudicating two and
a half centuries of debate, Thomas Twining concluded in 1789, “But after all, when
we have made the best we can of the text in this passage, we must allow, I believe,
that it is more for the credit of Aristotle to suppose it faulty.”61
For early modern commentators, the passage presented a puzzle of taxonomy
because, while Aristotle invites the conclusion that these species of tragedy corres-
pond to four parts mentioned elsewhere in the Poetics, he nowhere names a set of
four that would be good candidates.62 One interpretive tradition—which includes
Lodovico Castelvetro (1570), André Dacier (1692), and Charles Batteux (1771)—
holds that the unnamed fourth species is the simple and that the terms pathetic and
ethical, which are tacitly defined in opposition to each other, can modify either
complex or simple tragedies.63 For in pathetic tragedies, personages of at least mid-
dling virtue endure hardship and end in misery, whereas in ethical ones they do not
endure such suffering, or are at least rewarded in the end for their merits. According
to this schema, then, Oedipus the Tyrant is complex and pathetic; Iphigenia among
the Taurians is complex and ethical; the Ajax is simple and pathetic; and the
Philoctetes is simple and ethical. This schema can be mapped onto Robortello’s
attempt to define four kinds of tragedy that are differentiated by asking whether
the fable is simple or complex, how it ends, and, on the basis of these two questions,
what passions it arouses. The Philoctetes, Women of Trachis, Medea, and Hecuba are
simple tragedies that arouse pity. The Ajax is a simple tragedy that inspires both pity
and fear because of the terrible humiliation and suicide of its protagonist, who is
beset by a god-sent madness. Iphigenia among the Taurians and Sophocles’ Electra
are complex tragedies that provoke not only pity but, thanks to their recognitions
and reversals, wonder. And Oedipus the Tyrant, as a complex tragedy that contains
terrible scenes of suffering, inspires pity, fear, and wonder.64
Such taxonomies makes good sense when read in tandem with a passage in
chapter 24 of the Poetics:
Further, the epic ought to have its species the same as tragedy, i.e., either simple or com-
plex, (and) either ethical or pathetic; and its parts [outside of song composition and

60 Else (1967) 523.

61 Twining (1812 [1789]) 230. Gill (1984) 150–1 has a useful discussion of this passage.
62 He says that the mimetic arts imitate three things: the praxis (actions), ethoi (manners), and
pathê (passions) of men. He says that tragedy consists of six parts: mūthos, ēthos, dianoia, lexis, melopia,
and opsis, or fable, manners, sentiments, discourse, music, and spectacle. He groups these six parts into
three sub-sets consisting of three objects of imitation (fable, manners, and sentiments), two media
(discourse and music), and one mode (stage representation). He divides the soul of tragedy, its fable,
into the three parts that we have already noticed: recognition (anagnorisis), reversal (peripeteia), and ­suffering
(pathos). And he observes that a fable can be complex, simple, or episodic. So how was a commentator
to arrive at four parts when these were the cards he was dealt: a six, four threes, a deuce, and an ace,
but nary a four?
63 See Castelvetro (1978–79 [1570, 1576]) 1: 506. For a translation of Dacier’s note, see Aristotle
(1705) 317. Also see Batteux (1771) 334–6 and (1777) 3: 84; and Twining (1812 [1779]) 2: 226.
64 Robortello (1548) 103; Cave (1988) 58.
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128 What Was Tragedy?

spectacle] the same; for in fact it needs peripeties and recognitions and sufferings. . . . Each
of [Homer’s] poems has a certain construction, the Iliad simple and pathetic, the
Odyssey complex—with recognitions all the way through—and ethical. (1459b8–17;
my trans. based on Else)
Although Aristotle does not say explicitly here that the pathetic or the ethical
quality of a poem is determined by the ultimate felicity of its protagonist, the
­examples he cites invite such a conclusion.
An interpretation that holds that Aristotle is referring to nothing but the
structure and issue of fables when he defines four species of tragedy runs into
trouble, however, with his injunction, “one should try to have all (‘the parts’),
or at least the most important ones and as many of them as possible” (1455b34;
trans. Else). In what sense could a poet be expected to combine all these species,
or at least the most important ones, if they represented mutually exclusive master
plots? The answer, suggest a numerous body of commentators starting with
Robortello, might be contained either in chapter 6 of the Poetics, where Aristotle
names the six parts of tragedy (fable, manners, sentiments, discourse, music, and
spectacle), or in chapters 9 through 11, where he discusses complex, simple, and
episodic fables and where he identifies the three parts of a fable as recognition,
reversal, and pathos. Critics such as the Jesuit Martin Delrio, Daniel Heinsius, and
Gerardus Joannes Vossius observe that the complex tragedy relies heavily on fable
and that the pathetic tragedy must be “full of feeling [affectuosam]” or “pathetic
and full of emotions.” The examples that they list are Ajax, Hippolytus, and Hercules
furens. The ethical tragedy should, then, emphasize the portrayal or formation of
manners. Delrio and Vossius cite the Philoctetes as an example of the species, and
when one considers its vivid characterization of Odysseus, Philoctetes, and Neop-
tolemus, not to mention its dramatization of the ethical maturation of Neop-
tolemus, one can readily see how it might qualify.65 This line of interpretation—which
seeks to align the four species of tragedy with certain of Aristotle’s qualitative parts
of tragedy—was advanced in the twentieth century by no lesser authority than
Ingram Bywater, and many editors and translators have since that time accepted
his identification of the mysterious fourth species as the “spectacular.”66 It is
­rejected by Else, however, on the grounds that pathos is not one of the parts of tra-
gedy named in chapter 6.67
Early modern commentators find two ways around this objection. The more
elegant, first suggested by Robortello, says that the parts to which Aristotle refer
include the three subdivisions of the tragic fable.68 So just as two of those subdivi-
sions (reversals and recognitions) abound in the complex tragedy, the third (pathos)
may predominate in another species. Another solution suggested by Trissino iden-
tifies pathos with the third object of tragic imitation, dianoia (which he translates

65 Delrio (1593–95) 8; Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 62; Vossius (2010 [1647]) 573.
66 Bywater (1909) 53, 251. Earlier commentators often make other suggestions, however. Delrio
(1593–95) 8 believes that it is a species in which matters alien to humans are watched and conversa-
tions of the gods are introduced on stage, while Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 62 observes that the plays in
the fourth species, which include descents to the underworld, are all legendary.
67 Else (1967) 524.    68 Robortello (1548) 210–14.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 129

as discorso), because Aristotle says that mimetic arts imitate the actions, manners,
and passions (pathê) of men (Poetics 1447a28–b9).69 As we saw in chapter 2, if
mūthos is an imitation of an action; and ēthos is an imitation of manners; then
dianoia, the third part of tragedy, could be a discursive imitation of the passions.
This is the basis for the claim that simple pathetic tragedies must rely on discourse
rather than intrigue to touch audiences.
According to this line of interpretation, the Iliad is pathetic because of its depic-
tions of suffering, while the Odyssey is ethical because of its emphasis on manners:
Odysseus not only endures tests of character, he tests those he encounters in order
to judge whether they are “violent, savage, and unjust, or hospitable and godly in
their mind” (Odyssey 6.120–1).70 Aristotle’s advice that poets ought to combine
the four parts of tragedy now poses no difficulty, for there is no reason that a single
play should not make use of plot, the portrayal of manners, either deeds of suf-
fering or imitations of the passions, and one of the other parts of tragedy, be it
diction or spectacle. The Philoctetes might be both pathetic and ethical. After all,
it was famous in antiquity for its portrayal of pain, but it is also forthright about
its preoccupation with moral education. Twining even suggests that there could be
more than four types of tragedy in which a part that necessarily belongs to any
tragedy becomes salient enough to define a species: we might properly speak of
sentimental, rhetorical, spectacular, or musical tragedy.71 This line of interpretation
imagines the imitation of a human being’s thoughts and feelings as the essential
object of imitation for at least one species of tragedy, which could in theory achieve
its ends without creating a sense of suspense or wonder, effects that were firmly
associated with the complex tragedy.
It may seem obtuse to describe the Ajax, the Philoctetes, and Alcestis as simple
plays when modern scholarship uses the term “complex” to commend their ethical
profundity, their theatrical self-consciousness, and their rich imagery.72 But
when early modern critics refer to the simplicity of these and other plays such as
King Lear, they are maintaining that their ability to deliver intellectual discoveries
and to occasion an intense emotional response depends on their rejection of the

69 Trissino (1972 [c. 1549]) 2: 28.

70 For a recent analysis of the Odyssey as an ethical epic, see Gill (1990). Rees (1972) 11 comments,
“Here [Aristotle] would seem to be combining two different aspects of tragedy, the one concerned
with plot and leading to division into simple and complex, the other introducing a division using
the words pathos and ethos in a more general and less technical sense than they have been given in
the Poetics, that is, tragedies in which suffering and differentiation of character are more strongly
emphasized.” Alternatively, Batteux (1771) 337 suggests that a single tragedy may combine different
elements in different parts. A tragedy might be simple and ethical in its opening acts, but complex
and pathetic in its final ones. Or it might be possible to differentiate from the perspective of the persons.
Corneille’s Polyeucte is simple and ethical in the case of Sévère and Félix, but complex and pathetic in
the case of Polyeucte and Pauline.
71 Twining (1812 [1779]) 229.
72 Easterling (1978) 27. For similar remarks see Blundell (1989) 189; Goldhill (2012) 119–31.
Hawkins (1999) 339, 352 goes so far as to identify the Philoctetes as a complex ethical tragedy in the
Aristotelean sense. Yet when it comes time for her to identify a “recognition,” she points to the gradual
process of Neoptolemus’ moral enlightenment, not a “discovery at a particular moment in time,” and
when she must locate a “reversal,” she nominates the young man’s change of heart. Most early modern
critics would not have acknowledged these as recognitions or reversals.
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130 What Was Tragedy?

improbable contrivance of recognition scenes like those of Oedipus the Tyrant or

Thomas Corneille’s Timocrate.73 The Ajax has a plot, explains Heinsius in typical
fashion, in which “nothing is anticipated that does not happen,” “nothing new or
surprising” transpires, and “no sudden or unexpected reversal of fortune” occurs.74
Conceding that the intrigue of Oedipus the Tyrant is managed with consummate
skill, La Harpe insists that the Philoctetes is more “pathetic and touching,” requiring
a yet more wonderful art to sustain so slender an argument.75 Complex tragedies
may astonish, but the simple pathetic tragedy offers prolonged contact with anoth-
er’s soul, silent moments of resolution, a copiousness of expression, and a pain so
dilated, so measured out, that it becomes artful, even pleasurable.

RACINE’S BÉRÉNICE (1670)

In the gallery of illustrious women that moralists such as the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne
and prose elegists such as George and Madeleine de Scudéry published in the
1640s, Sophonisba and Mary Queen of Scotts rubbed shoulders with another
­unfortunate queen of antiquity, Berenice, who became a cause celébre in 1670,
when Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine presented rival dramatizations of her
doomed love affair at the Palais-Royal and the Hôtel de Bourgogne.76 Decades
later, Corneille’s nephew Bernard de Bovier le Fontenelle, Racine’s son Louis, the
abbé Dubos, and Voltaire left competing accounts of the affair. But it appears likely
that the idea to write a play on the subject originated with Corneille. When he
brought the proposal to Moliere’s troupe, the actors at the Hôtel de Bourgogne,
who had a habit of pre-empting their competition in this manner, may have soli-
cited Racine to write a play on the same subject. He may, in turn, have demurred
until the pleas of the actors were reinforced by the entreaties of the king’s
sister-in-law Henriette d’Angleterre. Whatever the precise sequence of events was,
Racine had been preparing for such a confrontation.77 In his preface to Britannicus
(1670), he had chided his critics for demanding an action heaped up with enough
incidents for a month, tricks of the theater that were surprising only because they
were improbable, and declamations that were remarkable only because they said
what they should not. He preferred a “simple action burdened with little matter,”
one that proceeded “step by step to its end” and was sustained by nothing but the

73 On King Lear as a simple tragedy which lacks a peripeteia, see Pye (1791) 195: Lear’s “misfor-
tunes go on in regular succession from their first cause, his obstinacy and self-opinion. The change of
fortune arises from the alteration of the conduct of his daughters; but this cannot be called sudden or
unexpected, since it is foreseen by all the persons of the drama, except the old king. I believe modern
dramas have oftener the simple than the complicated action, as our tragic distresses arise more from
manners and passion, than incident.” On the changing sense of “recognition” from Aristotle to the
present, when it is often used to mean an epiphany, see Cave (1988).
74 Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 34–5.    75 La Harpe (1799–1804) 2: 65.
76 For these earlier treatments of Berenice, see Le Moyne (1640–45); Scudéry (1642); and Couton’s
notice to Tite et Bérénice in Corneille (1980) 1: 1598–1607. On the concurrence of these two plays on
Berenice, also see Michaut (1907); Couton’s notice; Forestier’s notice in Racine (1989) 1446–56; and
Viala (2013). Merlin-Kajman (2000) 301–21 and Baker (2001) compare the plays.
77 For an interpretation that stresses Racine’s emulous rivalry with Corneille, see Defaux (1989).
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 131

“interests, the sentiments, and the passions of its personages.”78 Corneille may
have been stung by these criticisms, for in Tite et Bérénice he eschews jeux de théâtre,
but Racine only double-downed on his criticism by creating a Bérénice far simpler
than Corneille could imagine, confining his action to the moment when Titus
must utter a single command: that Bérénice leave Rome. The abbé Villars com-
plained that this was not enough matter to fill up a scene.79 Voltaire wondered that
Racine should have had the temerity to write a drama “without a knot, without
an obstacle, without any intrigue.”80 Such complaints echo into the twentieth cen-
tury.81 But this dearth is precisely what makes it a supreme example of the simple
pathetic tragedy.
Racine claims to take his subject from a single sentence in Suetonius: “Titus,
who loved Berenice passionately, and who even, as was believed, had promised to
marry her, sent her away from Rome, against his will and against hers, in the first
days of his reign.”82 “This action is famous in history,” he says, “And I found it
most suitable for the stage, because of the violence of the passions which it was
capable of exciting.” It is true, he admits, that he has not driven the queen to kill
herself like Dido, but “her last farewell to Titus, and the efforts she makes to part
from him, are not the least tragic aspect of the play.” Racine says that he found the
simplicity of the subject a positive advantage because he had “long desired to write
a tragedy of that simplicity of action which was so much to the Ancients’ taste. For
it is one of the basic precepts which they have left us: ‘Let what you do,’ says
Horace, ‘be always simple and whole.’ ”83
In a crucial declaration of generic affiliation that has received surprisingly little
comment from scholars, Racine then cites the Ajax and Philoctetes as exemplars of
this rule. The ancients “admired Sophocles’ Ajax, who kills himself out of chagrin,
because of the madness that seized him after the refusal to give him Achilles’ arms.
They admired the Philoctetes, of which the whole subject is that Ulysses tries to take
Hercules’ arrows by surprise. His Oedipus itself, though full to the brim of recog-
nitions, is less charged with matter than the most simple tragedy of our day.”84 This
reference to Oedipus leads Terence Cave to conclude too hastily that Racine cannot
be referring to Aristotle’s distinction between simple and complex fables, but Racine
is in fact maintaining it while positing a historical rupture: All Attic tragedies are
simpler than modern ones, but simple tragedies produced in either era will be less
charged with matter than complex ones.85 “There are people,” says Racine, who
think that this simplicity is a sign of poor inventive capacity,” without realizing
78 Preface to Britannicus (1670) in Racine (1989) 374.
79 l’abbé Villars, La Critique de Bérénice (1671), reprinted in Racine (1989) 517.
80 Commentaires sur Corneille in Voltaire (1973–) 55: 940, 948; Voltaire’s remarks are also reported
in La Harpe (1799–1804) 6: 3.
81 For example, Weinberg (1963) 157 blames the play’s structural weaknesses on its paucity of
­action; and Barthes (1972) 58 remarks that Bérénice is a model of Racine’s dramaturgy because in it
“action tends to nullity, to the advantage of an excessive language.”
82 This sentence in fact combines two sentences from Suetonius and attests to the passion of the
lovers in a way that Suetonius does not. The distortion is noticed by Niderst (1988) and by Forestier
in Racine (1989) 1468.
83 Racine (1989) 450–1.    84 Racine (1989) 451.
85 Cave (1988) 127; Niderst (1988) 321 is also puzzled by the claim.
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132 What Was Tragedy?

that “the essence of inventive capacity consists in making something out of

nothing.” Recalling Corneille’s observation that simple tragedies allow audiences
to abandon themselves to the present, Racine asserts that the accumulation of
­incidents is the refuge of poets who lack the vigor “to hold their spectators’ atten-
tion for five acts by a simple action supported by the violence of passions, the
beauty of the feelings, and the elegance of the style.”86
When the play begins, Titus and Bérénice have been in love for five years. With
the death of Vespasian, Titus has been declared the emperor, but he and Bérénice
have suspended their love during his eight days of official mourning.87 Bérénice
and all the other attendants at court believe that with his mourning behind him,
Titus will undertake a life-affirming rite of passage by marrying Bérénice. In reality,
Titus has privately determined that he will respect the laws of Rome, which will
not countenance a foreign queen. But he dreads telling the queen that he recog-
nizes their affair as a mistake (mon aimable erreur) (l. 461). The scene—a cabinet
located between the apartments of Titus and Bérénice—is a limen. Once a secluded
chamber, it is now a public space, and questions that were once intensely personal
have become matters of state (ll. 341–2). Its decor—festooned with the entwined
initials of Titus and Bérénice—is already a relic of the past. Its exits present the
choice Titus must make: Bérénice and amour await in one direction, Rome,
the senate, and gloire in the other.88
Racine works with four principal chessmen: Titus and Bérénice, Paulin (the Lord-­
in-waiting who reminds Titus of his duties to Rome), and Antiochus (the King of
Commagene, who, as a loyal friend to Titus and a hopeless admirer of Bérénice,
receives the confidences of both). The only action required to resolve the tragedy is
an utterance. On this point, Bérénice and Paulin are agreed. “Titus loves me, he
can do all, he has but to speak,” says the queen [Titus m’aime, il peut tout, il n’a
plus qu’à parler; l. 298]. “You can do all. Love, cease to be in love. The court will
always side with your desires,” Paulin assures the emperor [Vous pouvez tout.
Aimez, cessez d’être amoureux, / La Cour sera toujours du parti de vos vœux;
ll. 349–50]. Yet by his own admission, Titus has already been unable to speak
twenty times in the past eight days (ll. 473–4).
The action of the first four acts consists of little more than Bérénice looking
forward to their reunion; Titus trying to avoid it; Titus sputtering out, “Mais,”
“Hélas!,” “Rome . . . L’Empire” (l. 623)—each word emerging like the peak of an
iceberg whose depths are hidden far from view, but the whole falling short of the
speech act he must complete; then Titus dispatching Antiochus to explain his com-
motion (trouble) and his silence (l. 743) in an embassy that ends in distrust and
recrimination because Bérénice suspects the messenger of a duplicity motivated
by his own feelings for her. The actions on stage are not deeds by the standards of
the idealist philosophy of the tragic. They do not necessarily involve decision,

86 Examen to Cinna in Corneille (1984) 1: 779; Racine (1989) 451.

87 Biet (1996) 148 comments that the tragic action transpires “in the space of the comma in the
juridical and political adage: ‘The king is dead, long live the king!’ ” On the suspension of time in
Bérénice, also see Sussman (1975) and Racevskis (2008) 104–14.
88 The scene is described in Le mémoire de Mahelot (2005) 329; see also Maskell (1991) 16.
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performance, and reflection. Instead, they are great movements of the soul in
which the struggle to arrive at a decision is the action and in which the deferral of
such a climax affords a masochistic gratification.89 “There is nothing but what lies
in the inexhaustible sentiments of the heart,” says Voltaire, “in the passage from
one feeling to another, in the exploration of the most secret recesses of the soul that
could furnish the author with a trajectory. It is a prodigious feat.”90
At a later stage in our story, we shall find Diderot associating the ideal of simpli-
city with the natural speech of men and women, uttered without any consciousness
of a theatrical audience. But in Racine, discourse is often a means of structuring
and representing through time the movements of a soul. The rhetorical structure
of the discourse assumes an audience. Take Titus’ monologue in Act 4, scene 4. It
begins with the question, “Well, Titus, what will you do? [Hé bien, Titus, que
viens-tu faire?]” (l. 987), and it eventually ends with a resolution: “Let’s break
the sole bond [Rompons le seul lien]” (l. 1040). What could be a plainer example
of deliberative rhetoric?91 But much of the theatrical power and pleasure of
the monologue is generated by the forty-nine lines of verse that intervene and
postpone the moment of resolution. We are all the more conscious of that sus-
pense because we have just witnessed the effect that Titus’ hesitancy has been
having on Bérénice in another monologue that epitomizes the play’s dramaturgy
of dilation:
Phénice comes not? Unbending time seems slow in comparison to my fleet desires.
Nervous and restless, languishing, depressed, my strength fails me, and repose kills
me. Phénice comes not. Ah, how this prolonged wait fills my heart with a dire pre-
monition. Phénice will have no reply for me. Titus, the ingrate Titus, has not wished
to listen. He flees, he evades my righteous fury.
Phénice ne vient point? Moments trop rigoureux,
Que vous paraissez lents à mes rapides vœux!
Je m’agite, je cours, languissante, abattue,
La force m’abandonne, et le repos me tue.
Phénice ne vient point. Ah que cette longueur
D’un présage funeste épouvante mon cœur!
Phénice n’aura point de réponse à me rendre.
Titus, l’ingrat Titus, n’a point voulu l’entendre.
Il fuit, il se dérobe à ma juste fureur. (ll. 953–61)
Time extends as nothing happens, and in the absence of incident or news Bérénice
is left free to speculate, to fear, to gauge the disparity between her own subjectivity
and external measures. If her verse were set to music, it could take the form of a
rondeau with a pathetic theme returning and underlining the depth of her pathos
with each repetition of the text, “Phénice comes not.” In these repetitions, which

89 On the failure of Racine’s persons to reach a decision in their monologues, see Le Bidois (1900)
233–5. As Merlin-Kajman (2000) 308 observes, “Bérénice represents the duration needed for a catas-
trophe in order to produce all its effects, not the time that would create a chain of actions.”
90 Voltaire reported in La Harpe (1799–1804) 6: 3.
91 See Hawcroft (1992) ch. 5, arguing against the view that Racine’s monologues are lyrical expan-
sions of themes as maintained by Pocock (1973) 170; Scherer (1950) 246; Lapp (1955) 111.
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134 What Was Tragedy?

sound through the verse like an uneven metronome, suffering and the endurance
of time coincide.
Yet long pathetic speeches delivered to an auditor are just as important. The
Jesuit René Rapin documents the contemporary appeal of such speeches in his
1674 Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie (Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote et
sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes) when he maintains, in a passage that
we noticed in chapter 2, that it “is not the admirable Intrigue, the surprising and
wonderful Events, the extraordinary Incidents that make the beauty of a Tragedy, it is
the Discourses when they are natural and passionate.” These are what give Sophocles
the advantage over Euripides, who is a master of action and ethical sentences. Their
rarity in modern tragedy explains why “Tragedy in these Days has so little effect on
the Mind; that we no longer feel those agreeable Trances, that make the pleasure
of the Soul, nor find those Suspensions, those Ravishments, those Surprises, those
Admirations that the ancient Tragedy caus’d.”92 These are the same responses that
Rapin attributes to the intrigue of Oedipus the Tyrant, but here he imagines how
discourse alone can generate a similar effect. Consider the speech that Titus delivers
after he foresees Bérénice’s plan to commit suicide (ll. 1375–1422). He brings up
one image after another before the mind’s eye—including the physical symptoms
of his past anxiety and a vision of Rome chastising him (a clear example of the
rhetorical figure known as prosopopoeia)—to give expression to the slow move-
ments of his soul as it is driven in contrary directions. We may expect his speech to
terminate in a declaration, but he has come to the queen, he explains, uncertain of
his design (dessein), drawn by his love, hoping to find and to know himself in their
meeting (ll.1394–6). What has he found? A queen whose tangled hair and tear-
stained face have been left unrepaired so that he might behold his handiwork and
perceive death painted in her eyes. We move through trance and suspense to the
shock of encounter. Bérénice’s physical presence turns Titus’ thoughts in a new
direction: He will not diminish his glory by sighing with her at the ends of the
earth, but he will commit suicide if she cuts short her days. Titus delivers forty-
six lines without interruption (ll. 1375–1422). Sitting mute, Bérénice is slowly
transformed before our eyes during this speech from a dispirited woman unable
to support her own weight, to a queen seated in judgment, to a mistress who has
just been blackmailed. Antiochus then enters and quickens Bérénice with his
own revelation.
At moments like this we see Racine’s careful study of Sophocles’ use of entrances
and exits really pay off, for Bérénice relies on stage movement to achieve its effect.
It consists of a series of preliminary separations and rapprochements carried out on
the horizontal plane of the stage—with Titus seeking to evade his former love and
Bérénice seeking to approach where she has always been welcome. This horizontal
drama of appetite and aversion is punctuated by one great ruin and recuperation
enacted on the vertical axis of joy and grief when Bérénice sinks onto a seat. This
movement, as Christian Biet observes, has a double effect, for seating oneself
should be a sign of mastery on the tragic stage, but Bérénice is also constrained by

92 Rapin (1694 [1674]) 122.

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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 135

the emperor to remain still.93 She is silent and defeated as she listens first to Titus’
protestations and then to Antiochus’ resolution of suicide. But her silence, like that
of Euripides’ Iphigenia before the altar, marks a conversion that becomes legible
only when she rises to speak:
Whether I look at you, or regard his face, everywhere I meet the image of despair. I see
nothing but tears. And I hear talk of nothing but anguish, horrors, and blood about
to flow.
Soit que je vous regarde, ou que je l’envisage,
Partout du désespoir je rencontre l’image.
Je ne vois que des pleurs. Et je n’entends parler
Que de trouble, d’horreurs, de sang prêt à couler. (ll. 1483–7 / 1471–4)
Bérénice confesses that, although she was alarmed by the thought that Titus’ love
was extinct, she has observed his troubled heart and seen his flowing tears. At this
grim moment, she wishes to make a final effort to crown her love: She will live,
obey Titus’ orders, and depart. Turning to Antiochus, she admonishes him that,
just as Titus loves and forsakes and she loves and flees, he must persevere. The
knot is finally untied by Bérénice’s departure: “All is ready. They await me. Do not
follow my steps [Tout est prêt. On m’attend. Ne suivez point mes pas]” (l. 1517).
This is a fine example of Racine’s use of full-stops to slow the declamation of
actresses.94 As the queen exits, Antiochus utters a final “Hélas!,” thus completing
her Alexandrine. “You must be very sure that you have made yourself master of
the heart of the spectators to dare to end that way,” says Voltaire.95 Such bold,
devastatingly simple stage movements and unadorned expressions of grief convey
the impression that the speeches of the characters are more than mere rhetoric.
They are revelations of passions that are rooted in the body. The tears and sighs of
the dramatis personae reinforce this impression. In the most famous line of the
tragedy, Bérénice observes, “You are the emperor, my lord, and you weep! [Vous
êtes Empereur, Seigneur, et vous pleurez!]” (l. 1154).96 Hélène Merlin-Kajman
points to this line as evidence that Racine’s dramaturgy depends on a renunci-
ation of the legal fiction of the king’s two bodies (one corporal, the other mystical
and political). What is of interest to Racine and his spectators, she says, is not the
juridico-political definition of sovereignty but the tears of the emperor, which
bestow dignity on the individual in the eyes of the “torturer and the spectator,”
like a “new tunic of Heracles.”97 The comparison is a felicitous one, for it associ-
ates Titus with another hero from the pantheon of simple pathetic tragedy, one
whose sheer suffering also seemed to endow him with tragic dignity.
Racine would have known perfectly well that although some students of Aristotle’s
Poetics identified the pathos of Greek tragedy with the feelings of the tragic persons
on stage or even with the emotional response of the audience, others insisted that

93 Biet (2001) 49.    94 Grimarest (1760) 32; Maskell (1991) 127.

95 Voltaire reported in La Harpe (1799–1804) 6: 5.
96 On tears in Racine’s dramaturgy, see Biet (1996) and (2001).
97 Merlin-Kajman (2000) 319.
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136 What Was Tragedy?

it must refer specifically to a deed of violence such as murder, suicide, blinding, or

torture. Bérénice does make effective use of the menace of suicide, as Tom Bruyer
argues, but it seems determined to underline that the emotional suffering of its
personages is the essential pathos.98 Titus’s self-reproach for the suffering he has
caused the queen is one of the most audacious strokes of the play:
No, I’m a barbarian. I hate myself. Nero, so detested, could never carry cruelty to such
an extreme.
Non, je suis un barbare.
Moi-même je me hais. Néron tant détesté
N’a point à cet excès poussé sa cruauté. (ll. 1208–10)
Employing the same terms with which Longinus faults tragic bombast in On the
Sublime, Voltaire condemns these lines as a “puerile exaggeration.” How compare
a man who does not marry his mistress to a “monster” who assassinates his mother?99
Racine could not have failed to anticipate such a reaction. He must, therefore, have
believed that there was something important to be gained by inviting ridicule: our
momentary assent to the proposition that psychic suffering deserves to be spoken
of with all the seriousness of physical torture, that “it is by no means essential that
there should be blood and corpses in a tragedy.”100
The Comédie Français revived Bérénice at least 110 times between 1680 and
1770, but it did not escape controversy. The abbé Villars declared it nothing but “a
gallant tissue of madrigals and elegies,” and even more sympathetic readers such as the
abbé Dubos and Voltaire believed that it proved the justice of Corneille’s observation
that love was an insufficient basis for a tragic fable.101 In the nineteenth century, espe-
cially during the heyday of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, it fell into disfavor. “Bérénice,
to tell the truth, is not a tragedy,” wrote Théophile Gautier in 1859. “It sheds tears
only with no blood at all. It is a dramatic elegy which contains some passages full of a
grace that is a little soft and a sensibility that is a little lachrymose.”102
Bérénice, however, was written in the full anticipation of such judgments. It insists
that the sufficient conditions for a tragedy are “that its action should be great and
its actors heroic, that passions should be aroused, and that everything in it should
breathe that majestic sadness [tristesse majesteuse] in which all the pleasure of tra-
gedy resides.”103 Critics too often assume that Racine offers this majestic sadness as
a substitute for the traditional tragic passions of fear and pity and then argue, on

98 Bruyer (2012) 269–300.

99 Commentaires sur Corneille in Voltaire (1973–) 55: 954. Compare Traité du sublime in Boileau
(1966) 344, where he discusses the “Puéril” and “puérilité.” In English translation, Longinus reads,
“While turgidity is an endeavour to go above the sublime, puerility is the sheer opposite of greatness;
it is a thoroughly low, mean, and ignoble vice. What do I mean by ‘puerility’? A pedantic thought, so
over-worked that it ends in frigidity. Writers slip into it through aiming at originality, artifice, and
(above all) charm, and then coming to grief on the rocks of tawdriness and affectation” (Russel and
Winterbottom, eds. [1989] 146).
100 Racine (1989) 450.
101 l’abbé Villars, La Critique in Racine (1989) 517; Dubos (1719) 1: 101–4; Commentaires sur
Corneille in Voltaire (1973–) 55: 1032.
102 Gautier (1859) 155.    103 Racine (1989) 450.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 137

the basis of that false premise, that the substitution betrays the play’s allegiance to
the elegiac or its flirtation with the gallant.104 On the contrary, Racine is offering
an account not of the passions exhibited on stage but of the pleasure we take in
tragic representations. Alain Niderst exclaims, “No one ever said that ‘majestic
sadness’ was ‘all the pleasure of tragedy’ ”; but Aristotle’s commentators came close
to it.105 Ever since Robortello’s commentary of 1548, as we have seen, some critics
had turned to Aristotle’s description of the pleasure we take in mourning and lam-
entation (Rhetoric 1370b) to gloss his account of tragic pleasure. This is by no
means the only account of tragic pleasure that was current in Racine’s day, but in
his preface to Bérénice, Racine favors Robortello’s suggestion, which he would have
encountered in the 1643 edition of Daniel Heinsius’ On Plot in Tragedy (De Tra-
goediae Constitutione):
Moreover, not every pleasure is to be sought in tragedy, but the one proper to it.
Tragedy, however, is something that moves either horror or pity or both through a
probable and correct imitation of actions. Now as those emotions in themselves prop-
erly beget sorrow, so the imitation of them breeds pleasure. Thus it has been nicely
remarked by Aristotle in his Rhetoric that there is pleasure in grief and mourning,
as when we mourn the dead. Hence by (as it were) divine inspiration in the poet,
Andromache says, when she mourns her spouse, that the greatest pleasure had been
taken from her, for she had not received his last words and behests to keep in mind
night and day, and Lucan’s Polla continually gazed on the face of the man she mourned
unceasingly.106
Sorrow does not displace pity and fear from the tragic stage. Rather, pity and fear
engender a tristesse majesteuse, a noble grief and remembrance such as Andromache
might feel if only she, like the theater audience, had been privy to the last words
and actions of the absent one. The intensely nostalgic and mournful quality of
Bérénice is not a falling off; it is an audacious bid to arouse the pleasure peculiar
to tragedy.

M I LTO N ’ S S A M S O N AG O N I S T E S ( 1 6 7 1 )

A long critical history has hindered identification of Samson Agonistes as a simple

pathetic tragedy that shares classical models with Bérénice. In an address to the
British Academy marking the tricentennial of Milton’s birth, England’s most emi-
nent classicist of the day, Sir Richard Jebb, insisted that, however much Samson
Agonistes might look like an Attic tragedy, its spirit was at odds with its forms.
“Hellenism contrasts man with fate, Hebraism contrasts God and His servants
with idols and their servants.” The issue of Samson could not be in doubt: “Jehovah
has prevailed over Dagon; Israel is avenged on Philistine.”107 Jebb’s interpretation

104 See, for example, Declercq (1996); Bruyer (2012) 273–4. On Racine’s gallantry, see Viala
(2008) 71–81; and Shin (2001).
105 Niderst (1988) 323.    106 Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 47.
107 Jebb (1907–8) 345, 344. For similar remarks, see Collins, ed. (1917) 3. On the more general
distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism, see Leonard (2012).
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138 What Was Tragedy?

raised questions that pre-occupied Miltonists for much of the twentieth century.
To begin with, did Samson Agonistes in fact possess the formal properties of an Attic
tragedy? Samuel Johnson had detected the want of a “middle,” so a middle was
duly produced in the spiritual regeneration of the hero. Then, if Samson was to be
a tragedy of the best sort, it required a recognition and a reversal: The former was
found in the hero’s supposed spiritual illumination, the latter in his sudden deci-
sion to accompany the officer of the Philistines to the theater. Finally, Milton’s
embarrassing discussion of tragedy in the prefatory note to the drama had to be
explained away: “Tragedy, as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held the
gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems: therefore said by Aristotle
to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and
such-like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind
of delight, stirred by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.”108 The sting
was in the tail. How could Milton omit to mention that tragedy was an imitation
of an action, as Aristotle taught, and imply that it was the response of readers
or audiences to imitations of the passions that held the key to tragedy’s cathartic
effects? In what remains one of the most substantive, if willful, answers to that
question, John M. Steadman insisted that Milton was “attempting neither a com-
prehensive definition of tragedy nor a balanced statement of tragic effect”; that
some thirty years earlier he had referred to poetry’s ability to “paint out and
­describe” “all the changes of that which is call’d fortune,” with the clear implica-
tion that he must hold “a broader view of tragic effect than the preface alone
would seem to indicate”; and that he obviously knew the value of the “imitation
of an action.”109
Just when Miltonists seemed to have made Samson Agonistes tractable both to
the Poetics and to the discourse of reformed theologians, two readings, which again
took their origins from the Poetics, disturbed the equilibrium. Martin Mueller
maintained (quite rightly) that “the traditional interpretation of anagnoresis and
peripeteia in Samson Agonistes should be rejected.” Samson Agonistes was a simple
tragedy; what’s worse, it was “not even a good simple tragedy” because the violence
of the drama was done by an enemy to an enemy and because “Milton isolate[d]
Samson from humanity to such a degree that his pathos appear[ed] to be not merely
untragic, but positively anti-tragic.” Mueller’s unsatisfactory response to his own
profoundly important provocation was to identify a complex tragedy of Manoa
that was set in relation to a simple drama of Samson: Manoa, said Mueller, did

108 “Of that Sort of Dramatic Poem” in Milton (1997) 355. All citations of Samson Agonistes are
taken from this edition and cited parenthetically.
109 Steadman (1971) 179, referring to Milton, Reason of Church Government in Milton (1953–82)
1: 817. Although I strongly disagree with Steadman’s special pleading, there is much of value in his
article, which ably surveys many renaissance accounts of the passions. It is hard to know what to make
of Russ Leo (2011); this essay does acknowledge the affective register of early modern tragedy, but it
tries to do so via Heinsius’ and Vossius’ discussions of the constitutio of tragedy, or its disposition of
events. For example, at 231 he quotes Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 21: “If, on the contrary, [the poet] takes
no great account either of manners, diction, or thought, if he arranges the action carefully and with
requisite artistry, if he structures the incidents, if he knits together and finishes the fable as he ought,
he will accomplish the task of the tragic poet.”
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 139

experience a recognition, a reversal, and the “pathos of a philos” (in other words,
the death of his son), and his “cruel disillusion” could “not fail to rouse pity and
terror.”110 Miltonists could have their cake and eat it too: The spirit of Samson
Agonistes was Hellenic from Manoa’s point of view but Hebraic, triumphalist, and
antitragic from Samson’s. Irene Samuel would have none of this. In 1971, she
­argued (against centuries of consensus dating from Thomas Newton’s edition of
1752) that Samson Agonistes did not demonstrate “its protagonist’s election in his
final vengeance on God’s enemies.” Attaching great importance to the poem’s
genre—and assuming that tragedies must end, as idealist critics insist, in the dis-
grace or destruction of the hero and without a deus ex machina—she announced,
“Milton called Samson Agonistes a tragedy, not a martyr play. Its subject cannot be
Samson restored to divine favor.”111
To this day Miltonists remain deeply divided about the most basic questions
raised by the play. Is Samson a regenerate hero of faith who offers deliverance to
Israel? Or is he a flawed warrior who meets his end in a misguided and self-directed
act of vengeance (or even terrorism)?112 The way critics answer these questions
­depends in part on the models they perceive Milton to be imitating. Throughout
the twentieth century, most critics accepted Wilmon Brewer’s identification of two
key sources from Attic tragedy, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’
Oedipus at Colonus.113 These are the only plays that William Riley Parker deems
worthy of individual chapters in his study of Milton’s debts to Greek tragedy,
and they are likewise the plays on which Martin Mueller dwells in Children of
Oedipus.114 To designate Oedipus at Colonus as the controlling model of Samson
Agonistes is to favor a regenerate Samson who does “all this / With God not parted
from him, as was feared, / But favouring and assisting to the end” (SA ll. 1718–20).
For Oedipus hears the voice of a god in his final moments and is rapt up into
heaven or drawn down mysteriously into a kindly earth. Yet critics have not always
been convinced by the comparison. Writing in 1752, Newton commented that
although the opening of Samson bore some resemblance to Oedipus at Colonus,
“there is scarcely a thought the same in the two pieces.”115 It is not surprising,
therefore, that Joseph Wittreich, Jr., who has amplified Samuel’s revisionist inter-
pretation, should search for a different analogue.116 For if we imagine Euripides’

110 Martin Mueller (1964) 170 n. 4, 157, 172.

111 Samuel (1971) 236, 239. Samuel was anticipated by Carey (1969) 138–46 and followed by
Wittreich (1986) and Melbourne (1996).
112 For readings that see Samson’s destruction of the temple as a sign of spiritual regeneration, as a
call for political action, or as blow against idolatry, see Steadman (1959); Low (1974); Hill (1984);
Loewenstein (1993); Achinstein (2002) and (2003); Janel Mueller (2002); and Norbrook (2003).
Catherine Gimelli Martin (2010) ch. 8 seeks to draw Samson into the orbit of classical republicanism
and away from that of Protestant dissent; at 303 she appeals to Milton’s “tragicomic vision.” For reviews
of the controversy, see Wittreich (2002) and Tobias Gregory (2010). For recent vindications of Samson’s
actions, see Serjeantson (2009), and Schwartz (2009). On the appropriateness of seeing Samson as a
terrorist, see Carey (2002); Mohamed (2005) and (2006); Fish (2006); Loewenstein (2006); Wittreich
(2006); and Fleming (2008).
113 Wilmon Brewer (1927).
114 William Riley Parker (1937); Martin Mueller (1980) 193–212.
115 Milton (1752) 197 [SA, l. 3].    116 Wittreich (2002) 10–11, 36–9, 64–5, 199–200.
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140 What Was Tragedy?

Heracles as Milton’s model, we can interpret Samson’s toppling of the theater as

a slaughter of innocents.
In his prefatory epistle on tragedy, Milton invites readers acquainted with
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, to judge the work’s “style and uniformity,
and that commonly called the plot, whether intricate or explicit” (in other words,
complex or simple). I maintain that Samson Agonistes is a simple pathetic tragedy
and that its affiliation with the species points us to the Ajax and Philoctetes as its
classical models.117 Recognizing the generative influence of these plays on Samson
can help us to see that there is nothing untragic about the pathos of the play by the
standards of its Sophoclean models. Acknowledging Samson’s divided allegiance to
its models can, moreover, shed light on the divergent and conflicted responses of
modern readers, who cannot agree whether they are reading a story of isolation and
suicide or a fable of reintegration, healing, and glorification. The Ajax and the
Philoctetes return opposing but equally plausible answers.
Just as Ajax and Philoctetes must have appeared to many fifth-century Athenians
as estimable but bothersome heroes whose outdated code of honor would be diffi-
cult to assimilate to modern ways, Samson, who was enrolled as a hero of faith in
Hebrews 11, yet whose actions appeared to biblical commentators to be violent and
of dubious legality, must have posed a stern interpretive and ethical challenge to
readers encountering him in the traumatic aftermath of the English Civil Wars and
the Restoration.118 In both Attic tragedies, the hero is in an abject state when we
first see him. “Now the dread, the mighty Ajax, harsh in his might, lies low, stricken
by a turbid storm of sickness” (Aj. ll. 205–7). He is embittered by the ingratitude of
the Argive army, oppressed by the wrath of the spurned Athena, and pained in his
mind, “for to look upon one’s own calamities, when no other has had a hand in
them, lays before one grievous agonies” (Aj. ll. 260–2). Philoctetes lives in a cave,
as the chorus remark with pity: “with no companion he can look on, miserable
[d�rsamo|], always alone, he suffers from a cruel sickness and is bewildered by each
need as it arises” (Phil. ll. 169–75). Like Ajax, he bitterly resents his fellow Greeks,
who consigned him to a living death, “friendless, abandoned, citiless, a corpse among
the living” (Phil. l. 1018). “I am nought; for you, I have long been dead” (Phil.
l. 1030; trans. Jebb), he protests. The abject and rough-spoken Samson, stronger
than he is wise, clothed in “ill-fitted weeds / O’er-­worn and soiled” (ll. 122–3) resem-
bles these dejected warriors more than he does, say, the aged Oedipus. Like them,
he bemoans “miseries; / So many, and so huge, that each apart / Would ask a life
to wail” (SA ll. 64–6). Like them, he dwells in a world b­ etwixt the living and the
dead: “Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half ” (SA l. 79).

117 This does not preclude the valuable suggestion of Arthos (1968) that, in conceiving of tragedy
as an imitation of the passions, Milton may have been influenced by Monteverdi or his contemporary
Italian opera composers. I would, however, demur from his claim that Monteverdi’s musical dramas
are resolutely un-tragic and that Samson Agonistes is “a play which is as un-dramatic as it is un-tragic
because it is so much an imitation of the passions and the working of grace . . . ”(174).
118 Wittreich (1986) remains a treasure-trove of conflicted responses to Samson. It should, however,
be read in conjunction with Serjeantson (2009), which affirms that even reformed biblical commenta-
tors felt conflicted about many of Samson’s actions but insists that reformed commentators (as opposed
to many of the Catholics or Anglicans cited by Wittreich) uniformly deemed his destruction of the
theater to be justified.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 141

As Samson and Manoa debate what to do next, Samson insists that his “race
of glory” and his “race of shame” are “run” (SA ll. 597–8): “This one prayer yet
remains, might I be heard, / No long petition, speedy death, / The close of all
my miseries, and the balm” (SA ll. 649–51). This is the dearest wish of both
Ajax and Philoctetes. Ajax prays, “Ah, darkness that is my light, gloom that is
most bright for me, take me to dwell in you!” (Aj. ll. 394–6), and Philoctetes
first threatens to throw himself from a cliff, then asks the chorus for a sword,
“So that I can cut off my head and every limb” (Phil. ll. 1207).119 It is almost as
if Manoa has the opposed fates of Ajax and Philoctetes in mind. He argues that
suicide would show Samson to be “self-displeased / For self-offense, more than
for God offended” (SA ll. 514–15), and he holds out the hope of an alternative
narrative: God may heal Samson in order to use him once again as an instrument
of deliverance.
As Samson broods on his afflictions, he is visited by three ambassadors who rep-
resent the same pressures brought to bear on Philoctetes: deceit (dolos), force (bia),
and the persuasion of one who is sympathetic with him (peithō).120 In the Philoc-
tetes these forces manifest themselves in the fraudulent stories that Neoptolemus
and the false Merchant tell in an effort to ensnare the outcast and lure him onto
their ship; in Odysseus’ threat to bring Philoctetes away by force (Phil. l. 985); and
in Neoptolemus’ fair words, both when he secures the bow under false pretenses
(Phil. ll. 1268–9, 1271–2) and when he counsels Philoctetes in good faith to sail
with him as a friend (Phil. ll. 1373–5). In Samson, it is Dalila who, with “all her
snares” (l. 409), “Comes this way sailing / Like a stately ship” (ll. 713–14), thus
presenting the threat of deceit. Both the warrior Haraphah of Gath, who next visits
Samson, and the Philistine officer, who comes to bring him to the theater, pose the
threat of force:
Dispute thy coming? come without delay;
Or we shall find such engines to assail
And hamper thee, as thou shalt come of force,
Though thou wert firmlier fastened than a rock. (ll. 1395–8)
Finally, Manoa, who counsels Samson not to serve the Philistines but to go home
with him, trusting that God can “easy / Cause light again within thy eyes to spring,
/ Wherewith to serve him better than thou hast” (ll. 583–5), fills a role like that of
the chastened and reformed Neoptolemus at the end of the Philoctetes.
When Samson eventually decides to enter the theater instead, he equivocates in
terms that are reminiscent of Ajax’s “deception” speech:
Masters’ commands come with a power resistless
To such as owe them absolute subjection;
And for a life who will not change his purpose? (SA ll. 1404–6)

119 Jebb does not like jqs$ (head) and accepts Hermann’s correction vqËs$ (flesh, skin), saying that
the sense of the passage is, “‘hew all the flesh (from my bones), and sever limb from limb,’—a frenzied
exaggeration of his prayer in 748.”
120 On the importance of these words in the Philoctetes, see Knox (1964) 119. Garvie (1972)
describes the Philoctetes as falling into three parts in which the efficacy of deceit, violence, and per-
suasion are tested.
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142 What Was Tragedy?

Which master, the Philistines or the Lord God? And to whom might he owe
absolute subjection? His aside, “(So mutable are all the ways of men)” (SA l. 1407)
seems to glance at Ajax’s more expansive and lyrical meditation on the principle of
mutability that governs the affairs of nature and of men alike (Aj. ll. 669ff.)
When the messenger comes to report the cause of the hideous tumult in
the theater, Manoa is immediately apprehensive that Samson has behaved like
Ajax. “Self-violence?” he asks, “What cause / Brought him so soon at variance
with himself / Among his foes?” (SA ll. 1584–6). When he hears that Samson
was “self-killed / Not willingly, but tangled in the fold, / Of dire necessity” (SA
ll. 1664–6), he is relieved and declares that “all this” was accomplished “With
God not parted from him, as was feared, / But favouring and assisting to the
end” (SA ll. 1718–20). Although he has been apprehensive throughout the
drama that Samson will conduct himself like Ajax, he now declares his son’s story
to be a tragedy of deliverance like the Philoctetes. If so, an essential distinction
between the Philoctetes and Samson is that no god appears from the machine to
command Samson’s action. Whether or not the “secret refreshings” and “rouzing
motions” that Samson experiences should be counted as such, and therefore as
an element that is “foreign to the unity or totality of the action of the drama” has
worried some critics such as Russ Leo, but had Leo recognized the importance
of the Philoctetes to Samson as a model, he might also have observed that his
chief authority Heinsius singles out the Philoctetes as the salient example of an
unavoidable deus ex machina. Referring to the few exceptions that Aristotle
makes for such contrivances, he writes: “he no doubt had in mind the denoue-
ment of Philoctetes which had to be resolved by Hercules through contrivance.
For it was humanly impossible to get Philoctetes to go to Troy, and therefore it
was necessary to predict everything that was going to happen—and by whom
other than Hercules?”121 To the extent that the close of Samson is in dialogue
with that of the Philoctetes, the distinction that we sense is between muthoi
­authoritatively delivered from a machine and heard by everyone in the theater
and a strictly inward and untestable persuasion experienced by Samson alone.
Not even Manoa can be said to have the final, authoritative word on the signifi-
cance of Samson’s “rouzing motions” or his deed, but the semichorus’ comparison
of Samson to an “eagle” who “bolted” his “cloudless thunder” on the heads of the
Philistines as if they were “tame villatic fowl” seems to underline the difference
(in their minds at least) between Samson (who finally puts his enemy to rout)
and Ajax (who does not) (SA ll. 1695–6). For in the Ajax, the chorus of Salimanian
sailors urge their general to confront his enemies: “When they have escaped your
eye, they chatter like flocks of birds; yet were you suddenly to appear, they would
take fright before the great [eagle] and cower in silence, voiceless” (Aj. ll. 167–71).
Jortin noted this echo in 1734, and both Newton and Todd reported it in their
variorum editions, but it seems to have been disregarded by modern editors, per-
haps because a standard rendering of aigupion would be “vulture,” and this is in

121 Leo (2011) 245; Heinsius (1971 [1611]) 69.

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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 143

fact how Jebb and Lloyd-Jones translate it.122 However, some early modern
translators render aigupion as the Latin aquila (eagle); and in his commentary on
the play, W. B. Stanford affirms that they are right to do so because vultures do
not pursue or terrify other birds and because the Homeric epics do occasionally use
aigupion to refer to an eagle (esp. Odyssey 22.302).123
A major theme of both Ajax and Philoctetes is the resemblance between psychic
suffering and physical wounding, a resemblance that Milton’s language everywhere
insists on.
Apt words have power to ’suage
The tumours of a troubled mind,
And are as balm to festered wounds,
say the chorus (SA ll. 184–6), and Samson laments,
O that torment should not be confined
To the body’s wounds and sores
With maladies innumerable
In heart, head, breast, and reins;
But must secret passage find
To the inmost mind,
There exercise all his fierce accidents,
And on her purest spirits prey,
As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense,
Though void of corporal sense. (SA ll. 606–16)
Robert Thyer, a librarian who supplied notes for Newton’s edition, admired the
“sudden fits of impatience” in this speech and considered the “rough and unequal
measure of its verses” well suited to its intense feeling.124
The griefs that Samson describes in the verses that immediately ensue seem to
resemble nothing so much as the festering foot of Philoctetes. It must surely have
been this passage, more than any other, that prompted Richard Cumberland to
observe in 1785 that Samson possesses “the pitiable wretchedness of Philoctetes”
and that his condition is “the most abject that human nature can be reduced to
from a state of dignity and splendour”:125
My griefs not only pain me
As a lingering disease,
But finding no redress, ferment and rage,
Nor less than wounds immedicable
Rankle, and fester, and gangrene,
To black mortification. (ll. 617–22)

122 See Milton (1752) 301 [SA, l. 1695] and (1809) 3: 318 [SA, l. 1695]. Lloyd-Jones’s translation
for the Loeb Classical library actually reads “they would take fright before the great vulture and cower
in silence, voiceless.”
123 On the appropriateness of “eagle” as a translation here, see Stanford, ed. (1963) 80.
124 Milton (1752) 236 [SA, l. 606].
125 Richard Cumberland, The Observer, No. 76, 1785.
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144 What Was Tragedy?

The Philoctetes of Sophocles’ tragedy can at least find some relief by treating his
ulcerated wound with a healing herb of Lemnos. But Samson can find no such
balm for the torments of his mind, as he proceeds to complain:
Thoughts my tormentors armed with deadly stings
Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts,
Exasperate, exulcerate, and raise
Dire inflammation which no cooling herb
Or med’cinal liquor can assuage,
Nor breath of vernal air from snowy alp. (SA ll. 623–8)
William Warburton notes that this graphic “descriptive imagery” is “taken from
the effects of poisonous salts in the stomach and bowels, which stimulate, tear,
­inflame and exulcerate the tender fibres, and end in a mortification.”126 Mental
anguish, we are meant to infer, is even less remediable than physical dolor.
These are the imitations of the passions that Milton expects to operate on readers
like the simples employed in Greek homeopathic medicine, “for so in physic things
of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour,
salt to remove salt humours.”127 No one has successfully identified one source for
Milton’s account of catharsis (if such a thing can be supposed to exist), but every
element of it can be identified in the writings of humanists whom Milton could
have encountered in print or in person in Florence.128 In Giason Denores, he
might have found the unusual assertion that the pleasure taken in imitation is not
a result but a means of purgation. The end of tragedy, says Denores, is “to purge
the spectators, through the pleasure that is born of imitation and of dramatic rep-
resentation, of terror and of pity. . . . [per pugar gli spettatori col diletto, che nasce
dalla imitatione, & dalla rappresentatione dal terrore, & dalla misericordia].”129
This sheds light on the difficult syntax of Milton’s formulation, “to purge the mind
of those and such-like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure
with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.”
Denores helps us to see that with here has the force of “by means of.” Milton’s ana-
logy from Greek homeopathic medicine, on the other hand, likely owes a direct or
indirect debt to Lorenzo Giacomini’s pioneering exploration of tragic and medical
catharsis, which we noticed in chapter 2. Milton explains in a similar vein, as we
have just seen, that nature is “not wanting in her own effects to make good his
[Aristotle’s] assertion: for so in physic things of melancholic hue and quality are
used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours.” Thus the
depiction of Samson’s psychic wounds could be expected to inflame and then
temper and assuage those and such-like passions. The effect of the homeopathic

126 Warburton cited in Milton (1752) 236 [SA, l. 623].

127 “Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which Is Called Tragedy” in Milton (1997) 355.
128 Martin Mueller (1966) remains the best guide, though he is over-reliant on Weinberg (1961). He
mentions Giacomini but hesitates to press home the connection as forcefully as I would. Catherine
Gimelli Martin (2010) 283 is misleading when she describes Milton’s view of catharsis as “non-purgative”;
rather, Milton believes that purgation does not entail extirpation.
129 Denores (1588) 6, quoted and translated in Weinberg (1961) 2: 788.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 145

analogy is to reinforce the efficacy of passionate displays (not events that might
provoke a response) because like attracts like. The consequences of this dramatic
theory were not lost on William Hayley (a dramatist best remembered as the patron
of William Blake), who argued that Milton’s own “anguish and indignation” con-
tributed a peculiar energy and pathos to his representations of the passions, allowing
readers to “derive from this extraordinary composition a kind of pathetic delight,
that no other drama can afford.”130 Hayley’s appreciation may be more secular
than Milton intended, for as Leo observes, Milton’s decision to translate catharsis
on the title page of Samson with the Latin lustratio, or a “ritual cleansing,” pulls
tragedy into the orbit of religious ritual and spiritual affect. But the effect is not, as
Leo suggests improbably, to make God “the subject of catharsis as expiation,” the
being who enjoys “calm of mind all passion spent.”131 Here are the closing lines on
which this reading depends:
whence Gaza mourns
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent,
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind all passion spent. (ll. 1752–8)
According to Leo, all of the clauses beginning with “with” modify God rather than
the servants he is dismissing; thus it is God who has acquired new experience and
now enjoys calm of mind, all passion spent. The more natural reading, which is
consistent with Milton’s habitual syntax, is to apply these clauses to God’s servants,
the Tribe of Dan and, by extension, readers of the poem. If Milton’s choice of lus-
tratio to translate catharsis has any force at all in the end, it is to invite us to compare
the perturbations of the spirit that we experience when reading Samson with the
experience of divine furor described by Bernardo Tasso, father of the more famous
poet Torquato. Such a furor, says Tasso, is “a lustration of the rational soul, by
which God, having descended to it, from high and divine affairs to these low and
earthly affairs, recalls it to celestial things.”132
Identifying Samson Agonistes as a simple pathetic tragedy that oscillates between
the Ajax and the Philoctetes not only topples the claims of Samuel and Wittreich that
Samson cannot be restored to divine favor in a tragedy; it identifies a concrete cause
for the conflicting and conflicted responses of readers today. R. W. Serjeantson
may well be right that resistance theory and reformed commentaries on the book
of Judges have the effect of legitimating Samson’s final action, but they cannot
eradicate the radical ambivalence that Milton’s Attic sources lodge in the heart of
his tragedy, nor should they distract us from the importance that Milton attaches
to his just imitations of the passions.133

130 Hayley (1796) 168–9.    131 Leo (2011) 249.

132 Ragionamento della poetica in Tasso (1733–51) 2: 533.
133 Serjeantson (2009).
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146 What Was Tragedy?

S I M P L I C I T Y A N D R E F O R M AT I O N

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the example of Racine lent
impetus to the efforts of Italian poets to reform their own dramatic tradition by
returning to the models of antiquity, thus reclaiming both the moral function of
ancient Greek drama and the simplicity and economy of its plots and its language.
The Arcadian Academy founded in Rome under the patronage of Cardinal Pietro
Ottoboni was just the most famous of several informal academies dedicated to this
project.134 The most successful librettists to emerge from this Arcadian reform,
Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750) and Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), took the Venetian
and Neapolitan tradition of aria-based opera as their starting point, regularized it
according to the principles of verisimilitude and decorum laid down by French
Aristotelian critics, refined its portrayal of the passions in light of Descartes’ 1649
Passions of the Soul (Les passions de l’ame), and purged it of underworld descents,
divine interventions, and all the other marvels that had given scope for machinists.
The dramatic formulas of Metastasio so perfectly answered the demands of com-
posers, performers, and audiences that they quickly hardened into the conventions
of what is known as opera seria.
Yet by the 1750s, a new generation of reformers was expressing dissatisfaction
with the state of French classical tragedy and Italian opera seria alike. Pierre
Brumoy’s French translation of large swaths of the extant corpus of Attic tra-
gedy; David Garrick’s naturalistic acting style; Voltaire’s perplexing encounter
with Shakespeare; Cahusac, Noverre, and Angiolini’s campaign to transform dance
into a species of dramatic poetry performed in pantomime; and Algarotti’s criti-
cism of opera seria for falling short of its purported model, the Greek tragic
stage, all combined to make the definition and assertion of the simple and path-
etic a matter of urgency.135 Denis Diderot answered the call in two works of 1757
and 1758.
The simple and the pathetic keep company in Diderot’s critical vocabulary with
the true, the natural, the unified, the ancient, the primitive, and the naive. Diderot
prefers plots that do not depend on coups de théâtre, or unexpected incidents that
happen in the course of the action and that suddenly change the situation of the
persons. Their effect on the imagination is faint and transitory. He believes that the
spectators should instead experience the stage like a painting that is immediately
comprehensible as a unity. For this reason, he upholds the unities of place, time,
and action and adds a fourth, point of view. He calls for a strict economy of per-
sons and episodes. And he argues that structured discourses distort our experience
of our soul, which is like a tableau: “It exists as a whole and all at once: the mind
134 The tragedian, librettist, and literary critic Pier Jacopo Martello helped to create an off-shoot
of the academy in Bologna, while the Venetian dramatist and antiquarian Apostolo Zeno started the
Academia degli Animosi in Venice with a similar charter. Critics associated with these academies,
including Giovanni Maria Crescimbeni and Ludovico Muratori, attacked both the concettismo (or
mannerist style) of poets such as Giambattista Marino and the disregard for generic decorum and
dramatic economy in Venetian librettos such as Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s Giasone (set to music by
Monteverdi’s pupil Cavalli for the Venetian Carnival of 1649).
135 On the emergence of a reified notion of Greek tragedy, see Loraux (2001) and Dupont (2001).
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 147

does not proceed one step at a time.”136 Therefore compressed speeches that convey
a mélange of the passions, broken utterances, and physical gestures that display the
soul in action are more likely to attract, arrest, and enthral audiences—to absorb
them, in Michael Fried’s terms—than are tirades.137
Diderot argues that two contemporary genres have the potential to embody the
spirit of ancient tragedy: bourgeois tragedies written in prose and lyric tragedies
written in verse. In the service of the first claim, the Dorval of the Entretiens com-
pares George Lillo’s domestic tragedy The London Merchant (1731) to Sophocles’
Philoctetes.138 If they are both indecorous by contemporary standards, that is only
because they are so true and natural: Trueman and Barnevelt embrace on the floor
of a dungeon, and Philoctetes is seized by a paroxysm of pain outside a cave. The
inarticulate sounds of Philoctetes (ll. 745–6), which Fénelon had praised for being
more like natural sighs or cries than discourse, become a justification for prose
­tragedy in Diderot’s hands: “These cries form a verse that is scarcely metrical, but
the bowels of the spectator are therein lacerated. Do we have more delicacy and
more genius than the Athenians?”139 At a later point in the conversation, Dorval
once again slips easily from The London Merchant to the Philoctetes:
I will never leave off crying to our Frenchman: Truth! Nature! the Ancients! Sophocles!
Philoctetes! The poet presented him on the scene, lying at the entrance to his cave,
covered in torn rags. There he writhed; he suffered an attack of pain [douleur]; he cried
out; he let his inarticulate vocalizations be heard. The decor was primitive [sauvage];
the piece proceeded with no stage apparatus. True costumes, true speeches, an intrigue
simple and natural. Our taste must be very degraded if this spectacle does not affect
us more than one in which a man richly attired, dressed in a peruke . . . walks with
measured tread onto the scene and smites our ears with what Horace calls Ampullas,
et sesquipedalia verba, with sentences, with inflated drivel, with words a foot and a
half long.140
According to Dorval, the French tradition has preserved the ancient emphasis on
versification, which was suited to a quantitative language, spacious theaters, and a
style of declamation that was musical (notée) and accompanied by instruments.
But it has lost the simplicity that characterized the intrigue and dialogue of ancient
tragedy. If this means that the French should feel licensed to write domestic tra-
gedies on contemporary subjects in prose, it also implies that ancient tragedy and
the lyric theater may be suited to each other. Pressed to develop his claim, Dorval
demonstrates how suitable to musical setting are Clytemnèstre’s speeches at the
prospect of her daughter’s sacrifice in Racine’s Iphigénie (ll. 1301–14, 1693–9).141

136 Lettre sur les sourds et muets in Diderot (1996) 30. More generally, see Frantz (1998).
137 Fried (1980).
138 On Diderot’s bourgeois tragedy, see Szondi (1980). For the suggestion that his conception of
bourgeois tragedy may have been informed by the historical relativism that governs the introductory
essays of Brumoy (1730), see Pérol (1976).
139 “Project d’un traité sur la tragédie” in Fénelon (1983) 2: 1171–2; Entretiens (1757) in Diderot
(1996) 1138.
140 Entretiens (1757) in Diderot (1996) 1155–6.
141 Entretiens (1757) in Diderot (1996) 1186–8.
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148 What Was Tragedy?

He awaits a true genius who will unite simple dialogue, musical setting, and
pantomime effectively.
When Giacomo Conte Durazzo assumed control of the theaters in Vienna in
the 1750s, he established the conditions in which such a genius could flourish.142
The reformers in Durazzo’s circle included the dancing masters Angiolini and
­Noverre, the poet Calzabigi, and the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck. This
might seem like an unlikely group of revolutionaries, for, while he was living in
Paris in the 1750s, Calzabigi had published a complete edition of Metastasio’s
works, declaring him to be an exemplary tragedian, and Gluck had begun his
career by setting Metastasio’s libretti. But Calzabigi was also a keen reader of
­Diderot, whose ideas and prose he recycled brazenly.143 By the time he and
Gluck had completed Orfeo e Euridice, their opposition to the Metastasian
system was open. Orfeo presented a simple, pathetic fable without intrigues or
subplots. Like an Attic tragedy, it required only three actors; its music forwent
“passage-work, cadenzas, ritornellos, and all that is gothic, barbaric, and extrava-
gant”; its dances were pantomimes choreographed by Angiolini and integrated
into the action; and its sets, designed by Lorenzo Quaglio, reinforced the autumnal
mood of the piece.144
Gaetano Guadagni, the castrato who played the title role, had studied singing
under Handel and gesture under Garrick. He was famous for the “grace and
propriety” of his “attitudes and gestures,” as Charles Burney attested. But he also
cultivated a style of vocal expression that sought to draw the audience in: “Most
other singers captivate by a swell . . . ; but Guadagni, after beginning a note or pas-
sage with all the force he could safely exert, fined it off to a thread.” Burney reported
that Londoners resented Guadagni’s refusal to acknowledge the presence of the
audience or to “destroy the theatrical illusion by returning to repeat an air,” but his
style of performance was calculated to sustain the experience of aesthetic absorp-
tion that Diderot had begun to describe to readers of his Salon in the 1760s.145

G LU C K ’ S A LC E S T E ( 1 7 7 9 )

As he sought support for his next major collaboration with Gluck, Calzabigi con-
tinued to define his own ideals against the conventions of opera seria. Metastasio’s
dramas had “the sole virtue of being saddles for all horses,” he wrote to the imperial
chancellor Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz. It made no difference who sang the
roles, and because “these dramas could not please the mind, they needed all the
more to entertain the senses: the eye, by real horses in painted forests, real battles

142 On the reform of opera in Gluck’s era, see Hortschansky, ed. (1989), Paduano (1989), and
Heartz (2004), with further bibliography in all three texts. On Lessing’s response to Diderot, see
Worvill (2005), with further bibliography.
143 Hertha Michel (1918) 149.
144 Count Carl Zinzendorf, diary entries of October 5, 1762 and October 7, 1762, both in
Howard (1995) 58–9.
145 Burney, General History 2: 876–7 in Howard (1995) 57–8; Fried (1980).
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 149

on stage battlefields, and conflagrations made from coloured paper; the ear, by treat-
ing the voice as a violin and performing concertos with the mouth.” Against these
“Gothic” ornaments, Calzabigi set the ideal of “beautiful simplicity” embodied in
Alceste, and in the process he advanced a powerful new interpretation of the simple
pathetic species:
Here nature and feeling prevail. There are no maxims, no philosophy, no politics, no
similes, no descriptions, and no bombast. . . . The duration is limited to what will not
tire or weaken concentration. The subjects are simple, with no overelaborate plots, so
that a few lines are enough to allow the spectators to understand the action, which is
always unified, not complicated or duplicated. . . . Reduced to the form of Greek tra-
gedy, the drama has the power to arouse pity and terror, and to act upon the soul to
the same degree as spoken tragedy does.
Vienna received Alceste as Calzabigi could have wished. One reviewer reported that
the public found it “pathetic and mournful”; another observed that, although a
libretto “in which the tragic and melancholy are equally and unrelievedly spread”
could have elicited a monotonous score, Gluck had “overcome this difficulty with
many glories”; and Metastasio recognized in the work a direct assault on his own
dramaturgy.146
Thus when Gluck followed his singing pupil Marie Antoinette to Paris, he was
preceded by his reputation as a reformer. In a letter published in the Mercure de
France in 1773, he handsomely acknowledged that Calzabigi had set him on the
path to develop the resources of his art by supplying libretti “full of those choice
situations, and moments of terror and pathos, which provide the composer with
the opportunity to represent passions, and to create powerful and touching music.”
He now looked forward to collaborating with François Louis Grand Leblanc
de Roullet and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to seek “a type of melody which is noble,
expressive, and natural” and a music that, by returning to nature by way of the Greeks,
might do away with “the ridiculous differentiation between national musical styles”
and rediscover some of “the marvellous effects which the ancients attributed to
music.”147 The Alceste that resulted from this ambition is more than just a transla-
tion; it is a revision that pursues the ideal of beautiful simplicity even more strictly
than Calzabigi had.
The D minor overture of Alceste—with its menacing trombones; its long des-
cending line in the violins, rhythmically hesitant and distinctly chromatic; and its
alternating moods of terror and pity, agitation, and stately mourning—lays out the
argument of the drama before leading the audience to the threshold of death. For
Admetus, the king of Pherae, is slated to die this day unless a surrogate volunteers
to die in his place.148 An appreciative contemporary, whose reactions to Alceste are

146 Johann Josef Khevenhüler-Metsch, Aus der Zeit Maria Theresias: Tagebuch . . . , vol. 1764–67:
280; January 15, 1768, “Briefe über die Wienerische Schaubüne,” Gesammelte Schriften (Vienna,
1784), v. 176; Metastasio, Letter to Count Bolognini, February 7, 1776; Calzabigi, Letter to Antonio
Montefani, May 1, 1778. All translated in Howard (1995) 81–3, 86.
147 Gluck, letter to the editor of the Mercure de France (1773) in Howard (1995) 106–7.
148 Michael Noiray provides helpful guides to the score, from which I have profited, in L’Avant Scène
opéra, No. 73 (1985): 32–79 (whose livret I follow); and L’Avant Scène opéra, No. 256 (2010): 8–53.
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150 What Was Tragedy?

recorded in the 1776 Supper of Enthusiasts (Le Soupir des enthusiastes), says that
because he heard the sound of “sobs, grievous cries, and laments” from the orchestra,
his soul was moved and prepared for some dire event even before the curtain rose.
Then he felt himself truly transported back to “the times of ancient Greek tragedy,”
for here were not immobile supernumeraries alien to the action but a people
fervently praying for their king, “Gods, give us back our king, our father [Dieux,
rendez nous notre roi, notre père].” The chorus sing the same words slowly, then
more quickly because, as the observer remarks, “such is the march of grief: it pene-
trates the soul before it moves it strongly.”149 A herald proclaims that the king is in
his last hour.
The doors of the palace then open to reveal Alceste and her children. As she
approaches, the members of the chorus divide to commiserate by turns with
Admète and Alceste:
O unhappy Admetus! O unhappy O malheureux Admète! O malherueuse
Alcestis! Alceste!
O destiny too cruel! O fortune truly dire! O trop cruel destin! ô sort vraiment funeste!
Gluck’s orchestration associates Admète with the oboe and Alceste with the flute.
Henceforth when these instruments play, they often represent the presence of the
king or queen in the thoughts of the other stage persons. Alceste engages in a lyric
dialogue with the chorus. Then a smooth melodic line described by an oboe intro-
duces her prayer, “Grands dieux!” What at first promises to be a set-piece aria with
a closed musical form becomes something closer to a tirade whose turns are defined
by the new objects that she considers: the gods, her own pain, which none but a
wife and mother could comprehend, and her children. The first turn is marked by
second violins and bassoons assuming the bass line, the second, when she gathers
her children in her arms, by a pathetic formula in B flat minor. “How her voice
abases itself,” exclaims The Supper. “How her song, which immediately assumes a
humble character, but not the less pressing for that, changes each time she passes
from one sentiment to another. There are alternatively the alarms of a mother and
a spouse, her grief, her despair, and in the orchestra, the tumultuous movements
that reveal that her soul is tormented.”150
The perturbations of Alceste’s soul aroused by her strong attachment to the
things of this world stand in contrast with the serene pantomime of the priests of
Apollo, with its major tonality, its regular dactylic rhythm, and its slow pace, all
suggestive of light, plastic form, harmony, and law. The pronouncement of the
priest is more spoken than sung because “a god is exempt from all the human pas-
sions to which song gives expression.”151 Yet, however calmly it may be delivered,
the dreadful news that Admète must die today if no one will take his place has a
terrible effect on the chorus, who cry, “Let’s flee! Let’s flee! No hope remains for us!
[Fuyons! Fuyons! Nul espoir ne nous reste!].”

149 Le Soupir des enthusiastes in Lesure, ed. (1984) 70–1. On the reception of Gluck in Paris, see
Goldhill (2011) ch. 3.
150 Le Soupir in Lesure, ed. (1984) 71–2.    151 Le Soupir in Lesure, ed. (1984) 73.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 151

Left alone on stage, Alceste comes to the realization that only love is capable
of redeeming her husband. In an excursion from the act’s minor tonalities, she
sings her air “Non, ce n’est point un sacrifice” in D major, which, as Michel
Noiry observes, is a fine “affirmation of free will before death.”152 Gluck casts her
monologue in the form of a rondeau in which Alceste’s sense of resolution is
tested by the recollection of her children—marked by the sighs of oboes and
clarinets in the orchestra: “O my children! O useless regrets! [O mes enfants!
O regrets superflus!].” But even the thought of these cherished objects cannot
restrain her from returning to her resolution. The act ends as Alceste invokes the
Arbiters of the lot (sort) of humans. Here, says the Supper, “the music mounts to
the last degree of sublimity; the voice of Alceste seems to have nothing more
of the human, we believe already that we are listening in another region.”153 Thus
Act 1 passes in an unremitting progress from the specter of Admète’s death to the
prospect of Alceste’s.
Act 2 begins with a striking contrast of mood, as the chorus sing and dance in
celebration of the king’s revival, little knowing at what price. As Admète enters, his
people attempt to reclaim him fully to the land of the living by pulling him up
from his minor tonalities to the major. When Alceste returns from the temple to
greet Admète, their meeting is pungent with tragic ironies as they express the same
passion in unison but for different reasons:
I no longer fear the implacable wrath Je ne crains plus du sort le courroux
of fate, obstiné,
And my grief is erased. Et ma douleur est effacée.
As the chorus rejoice—adorning their heads with flowers, soon to become emblems
of the fragility and brevity of human life—the inappropriateness of their passions
pierces Alceste to the heart, eliciting a tearful aside. The flute, which has been
associated with Alceste since the first chorus of commiseration, leads the orchestral
accompaniment, while the queen, still endeavoring to master her grief, reports
on the rebellion of her body in a vocal line that confines itself to only two notes
toward the end of her speech. Assuming that Alceste is suffering from residual fears
for his own life, Admète sings the only da capo air of the tragedy, enjoining her to
banish her fears in the same A major employed by the chorus for, “Vivez, aimez des
jours.” Admète’s air only solicits new tears. The dramatic tension builds as the king
cross-examines his consort about the identity of the surrogate victim, eliciting the
reluctant reply, “Oh! who but Alceste should die for you? [Eh! quel autre qu’Alceste
/ Devait mourir pour toi?].” Moved to an anger that is eventually tempered by love,
Admète determines to reject Alceste’s sacrifice. Like so many other heroes of simple
pathetic tragedies, he insists that his spiritual torment is worse than death, that
death, indeed, is the only good to which he can now aspire. Alceste implores
the gods to block his desperate project. In the final tableau of the act, she sings
her great air, “Ah! malgré moi [Ah, despite me],” and the chorus are moved by her

152 L’Avant-Scene Opéra: Alceste, No. 73 (1985) 45.

153 Le Soupir in Lesure, ed. (1984) 76.
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152 What Was Tragedy?

torment to comment on the cruelty of the Fates and the brevity of human existence,
which is like a fleeting dream or a withered flower.
The dimming light on the stage reminds the audience that the day—and there-
fore Alceste’s life—must draw to a close. As Evandre and a leader of the chorus
deplore the fate of Thessaly and its royal couple, a “lamenting and mournful”
chorus opens Act 3. The members of the chorus are split, with a large ensemble on
stage and a small one behind the scene, creating the impression of a numerous
people mourning into the distance.154 The scene changes to a barren landscape
of blasted trees. Menacing rocks overhang the stage on one side, flames erupt
from the entrance to Hades, and the altar of death awaits center stage. As Alceste
­advances through the gloaming, she reports on the sights she sees, which freeze her
heart with terror. In one of the most pathetic melodies of the piece, which seems
to embody all the beauty and vulnerability of humanity, she begs the infernal
deities to hasten her death. When Admète overtakes her, the two compete in a duet
for the privilege to die—thus “correcting” one of the most indecorous aspects of
Euripides’ original: Admetus’ readiness to let his wife die for him. When an infernal
deity appears, he gives Alceste a final chance to renounce her vow, but she proceeds
into the shadow of death. Hercule, who has already announced his intention to
intervene earlier in the act, then enters, struggles with the infernal deities below
stage, and returns with Alceste in hand. Apollo appears from a machine to praise
both Hercule’s heroism and the royal couple’s conjugal affections. He dissolves the
shadows and returns the scene to the courtyard of Admète, where the people of
Thessaly rejoice in the unexpected bounty of this fortunate moment. As they per-
form a chaconne, a courtly dance associated with weddings in the French tradition
and often employed by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau to bring acts
to a close, they reaffirm the virtues of familial piety and the Apolline principles of
order and light.
The success of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulis, Alceste, and Iphigénie en Tauride posed
a threat to the great tradition of declaimed tragedy that ran from Corneille
through Racine to Voltaire. “He alone has rediscovered the dolor of the ancients.”
“Here I truly believed myself to have returned to the time of ancient Greek tra-
gedy.” “Every time I listen, I feel myself cast back to the days of ancient Athens,
and I believe that I am sitting at a production of the tragedies of Sophocles and
Euripides.”155 So ran Gluck’s praises.

L A H A R P E ’ S P H I LO C T È T E ( 1 7 8 1 )

La Harpe published Philoctète in 1781, two years before it was performed at the
Comédie-Française in a new salle whose form was intended to invoke (even though

154 Le Soupir in Lesure, ed. (1984) 85.

155 L’abbé François Arnaud, quoted in Tiersot (1930) 355; Lettre sur Opéra d’Iphigénie (1774) and
Problême (1777), both in Lesure, ed. (1984) 70, 245. On Gluck’s loss of prestige as an interpreter of
Greek tragedy in the early twentieth century, see Goldhill (2011) ch. 3.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 153

it did not reproduce) that of an ancient amphitheater.156 By the 1780s, the cultural
hegemony of French classical tragedy was being undermined by three rival dramatic
traditions: the bourgeois tragedy of Diderot and Lessing; the English tragedies
of Shakespeare, which were gaining currency now that a complete edition of his
works had been published under royal protection and his French translator had
declared that the Poetics should be revised in light of them; and the lyric theater of
Gluck.157 Whereas Voltaire had once confidently dismissed Greek and Shakespearean
tragedy alike as too primitive to please the civilized French (citing the wounds of
Hippolytus and Philoctetes as evidence), such refinement was beginning to look
effete.158 It was easy for Lessing to ridicule it in the Laocoön (1756): “Thanks to our
well-mannered neighbors, those masters of propriety, a wailing Philoctetes or a
bawling Hercules today would be the most ridiculous and unbearable figure on
stage. One of their most recent poets has, to be sure, ventured on a Philoctetes, but
did he dare to show his audience the true Philoctetes?”159 ( Jean Baptiste Viven de
Chateaubrun’s Philoctète of 1755, as Lessing no doubt knew, never loses com-
mand of himself in his pain). La Harpe accepted Lessing’s challenge by rendering
Sophocles’ Philoctetes into verse that, while respecting the traditional Alexandrine
of the French tragic stage, sought to shed all that was pompous and artificial in the
earlier (selective) verse translation of Jean Racine’s son Louis. In doing so, he not
only countered Diderot’s claim that bourgeois tragedy was the true heir to the play;
he set the simplicity of the ancients against the multëity of Shakespeare and drove
a wedge between declaimed and lyric theater, proclaiming tragedy the property
of the former. “Where did you get the idea that opera is or could ever be tragedy
for us?” he snarled in response to Gluck’s admirers. “Let us not seek to join that
which must be separated. At the Théâtre-Français, tragedy is in its place; and music
is in its place at the Opéra.”160
To behold (or imagine) “rags drying in the sun, stained with matter from some
grievous sore” (Phil. ll. 38–9), a body bathed in sweat, and a foot oozing blood and
emitting a terrible stench, and to hear Philoctetes’ interminable relations of his suf-
fering punctuated by sub-verbal cries of pain and woe, must have tested (however
brilliantly and audaciously) the patience even of the Greeks. La Harpe shows greater
deference to the sensitivity of Parisians. Philoctète’s abject poverty is suggested only
by the use of a wooden drinking vessel, and we hear of no puss-soaked rags drying
in the sun. But we do hear of dolor, evils, torments, suffering, pains, tears, moans,
trembling, cruel exile, and veins burning with poison. What is concrete in Sophocles
(“I beg you, if you have a sword handy, strike at my heel! Lop it off quickly!”;
ll. 747–9) often becomes more abstract: “My son, with a sword end my sorrows.
Cut, cut short my days. . . . Strike, I say. . . . I am dying, I am dying every moment

156 On La Harpe’s Philoctète, see Brillaud (2010a) 136–60. On Parisian theaters, see Rabreau
(2008); D’Oria (2007); Frantz and D’Oria (1999); and Brillaud (2010b).
157 See Pemble (2005) 5.
158 Discours sur la tragédie à milord Bolingbroke in Voltaire (1973–) 5: 171.
159 Lessing (1984) 10–11.
160 La Harpe (1839), 12: 205, 208. On the distinction between literature and opera in late
eighteenth-­century Paris, see Thomas (2002) 29–52.
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154 What Was Tragedy?

[Mon fils, avec le fer termine mes douleurs, / Tranche, tranche mes jours . . . frappe,
dis-je . . . je meurs, / Je meurs à chaque instant]” (1.1).161 But such refinements
were insufficient for some of La Harpe’s critics, who saw the play as an affront to
French taste. In the Année littéraire of 1783, Julien-Louis Geoffroy complained that
La Harpe’s Philoctète was “a miserable man who moans, who cries, who implores
help, who surrenders himself to all the transports of rage and despair. Not a word of
his courage, or his victories: always crudely occupied with his grief and his
resentment.”162
La Harpe’s determination to remain true to the simplicity of the ancients is
­nowhere more apparent than in his denouement. He knew that the Poetics found
fault with the use of the deus ex machina to resolve plays (1454b2–7); that Horace
had warned, “let no god intervene, unless a knot come worthy of such a deliverer”
(Art of Poetry ll. 191–2); and that Racine had declared theophanies to be too
implausible for the modern stage. He must have been conscious that Châteaubrun
had relied entirely on the persuasive power of Ulysse’s rhetoric to bring Philoctète
to Lemnos. But La Harpe nevertheless introduces Hercule from the clouds to
admonish his old friend that he must yet prove himself with labors. The choice was
not approved by all critics: Geoffroy, for one, preferred Châteaubrun’s solution.163
But La Harpe seems to have wanted to make a bid to reclaim the naive sublime
from bourgeois tragedy and opera alike.
Although Philoctète achieved a modest success, La Harpe’s most lasting legacy
would be the lectures that he delivered at the newly formed Lycée and that he pub-
lished as his 1798–1804 Course of Literature Ancient and Modern (Lycée ou cours de
littérature ancienne et moderne). These were so successful that Stendhal remarked in
1824, “It is no longer Racine, Molière, Don Quixote, etc., that the law students and
medical students read to the point of wearing out three or four copies every year.
Now it is La Harpe’s Course of Literature.”164 “It is an honor to the memory of
Sophocles,” writes La Harpe,
that those who wish to find the masterpiece of ancient tragedy must choose between
two of his works, Oedipus the King and Philoctetes. I do not know if my own interest
distorts my judgment; but I was an admirer of the second for a long time before I dreamt
of being its imitator, and my predilection for this work was known. There is in Oedipus,
I confess, more to interest our curiosity, but there is in Philoctetes a more touching
pathos [pathétique]. The intrigue of the former develops and unties with much art; but
it is an art perhaps more admirable to have been able to sustain the simplicity of the
other. Perhaps it is yet more difficult to speak always to the heart by expressing true
sentiments, than to fix our attention and hold it in suspense, so to speak, with a thread
of events.165
Despite all the critical and theatrical developments that separate La Harpe from
Trissino, the basic distinction between a complex tragedy that relies on a chain of

161 La Harpe (1786) 1.4, henceforth cited parenthetically by act and scene.
162 L’année littéraire (1785) 5: 76, discussed in Brillaud (2010a) 156.
163 Mémoires secrets (1784) 23: 12; Brillaud (2010a) 148.
164 Stendhal (1962) 167; I’ve made minor changes to the translation.
165 La Harpe (1799–1804) 2: 65.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 155

events to appeal to our curiosity and a simple tragedy that relies on sentiments
­expressed in discourse to express the pathetic remains in force. After citing Pierre
Brumoy’s appreciation of the play with approval, he tackles the Jesuits’ judgment
(made in 1730) that the Philoctetes was too “simple” and too dominated by “the
spectacle of a wretch so miserably tortured as Philoctetes” to appeal to the “taste and
manners” of the French; it could not produce the “lively pleasure” of the “more
brilliant and varied misfortunes of the Nicomède of Corneille.”166 How, asks La
Harpe, can there be too much simplicity? And what an extraordinary comparison
to make, when “the principal merit of [the Philoctetes] is to abandon us in the
pathetic, and that the grand fault of [Nicomède] is to be utterly devoid of it.” As
proof that the French can write with the taste and simplicity of the ancients, La
Harpe adduces Fénelon’s 1699 Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (Les Aventures
de Télémaque: fils d’Ulysse), the most widely read book in eighteenth-century France
and the only reading matter (besides Robinson Crusoe) that Rousseau provides for
his ideal pupil in Émile (1762). The point is a telling one because Brumoy had
­already turned to the book when trying to imagine how the Greeks must have
reacted to the Philoctetes. When Fénelon’s Philoctetes recounts the events
­
­dramatized in Sophocles’ play, the artless face of the young Telemachus displays in
turn “all the different passions” that “had agitated Hercules, Philoctetes, Ulysses,
and Neoptolemus.”167
La Harpe believed that his Philoctète was a novelty on the French stage because
it not only eschewed a love plot; it omitted women altogether from the cast list.
Yet his theories of simplicity and unity at times come into conflict even with
Sophocles. He deems the episode of the False Merchant to be unnecessary and
­superfluous to the action. And as the abbé Auger complained in an anonymous
review, he suppresses Philoctetes’ beautiful leave-taking from the island in the
name of strict dramatic economy. Once “the principal knot has been cut,” La
Harpe argues, apostrophes “to the light, to the cave, to the nymphs, to the streams,
to the sea, to the beach” may furnish harmonious verses, but they protract the piece
without purpose.168 Most striking of all, La Harpe suppresses the choruses of the
Philoctetes altogether—one of the features most admired in modern criticism.169
As early as 1728, the abbé René Vatry had argued before the Academie des inscrip-
tions et de belles-lettres that, without sung choruses, French declaimed tragedy could
not satisfy the soul. The chorus, he explained, should interpose themselves between
the dramatis personae and the audience, displaying all the impressions that the
speeches and incidents should excite, listening, commending, censuring, giving
counsel, and putting all the questions that the spectators would put if they could
speak.170 Against such a premise, La Harpe defends his decision on grounds both
practical and theoretical. The chorus contribute nothing to the action and at times
impede it, he claims. If he had included a chorus, the players would have refused

166 Brumoy (1759) 1: 254. On Brumoy’s formation of French tastes, see Brillaud (2010a) 84–106.
167 Brumoy (1759) 1: 251, quoting Fénelon.    168 La Harpe (1799–1804) 2: 87.
169 Goldhill (2012) 119–31, with earlier bibliography.
170 Histoires et mémoires (1710–93) 8: 204–10; Brillaud (2010a) 79–80.
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156 What Was Tragedy?

to perform the play.171 But La Harpe’s quest for generic purity may have been his
strongest motive. Vatry had claimed that from one complete Greek spectacle, the
French had derived two imperfect species, declaimed tragedy and opera. La Harpe
argues otherwise. He maintains that in the Greek theatrical system dialogue and
choruses could produce “a harmony and a unity of effect” because they were both
sung. But to introduce a sung chorus into a system of declaimed tragedy would
result in “a confusion of sounds, a cacophony at once ridiculous and disagreeable.”172
La Harpe wanted his play to serve as an antidote against the contagious ideas
of those writers who wished to “transport opera to tragedy, and tragedy to the
lyric stage.”173

F RO M PAT H O S TO M O R A L F R E E D O M

Both Gluck’s Alceste and La Harpe’s Philoctète could be described as timely answers
to Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s call for a revival of the “noble simplicity and
calm grandeur [edle Einfalt und eine stille Grösse]” of the Greeks, a call that was
greeted with rapture in late eighteenth-century Paris.174 But Winckelmann’s praise
of heroes such as Philoctetes for displaying the will’s determination to resist pathos,
rather than the body’s capacity to endure suffering, would eventually do even more
to promote the conviction that simple displays of the pathetic did not merit the
status of tragedy. How is that so? We must turn for our answer to Winckelmann’s
influential description of the famous Hellenistic statue group, the Laocoön (Fig. 3.1),
which he initially interpreted in 1755 on the basis of engravings: “Laocoön suffers,
but suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles: we weeping feel his pains, but wish for
the hero’s strength to support his misery.”175 The moment in the Philoctetes that
Winckelmann must have had in mind begins when Philoctetes is rendered mute
by a sudden paroxysm of pain.176 “Why are you silent like this, although nothing
has been said, and stand as though struck dumb?” asks Neoptolemos (Phil. ll. 730–1).
A few lines later, Philoctetes confesses his pain, concluding with an inarticulate
cry (Phil. ll.742–6). For Winckelmann, the momentary, apparent quietude, the
uncanny stillness of Philoctetes holds the key to the Laocoön’s aesthetic success:
“sufferings alone had been ‘parenthyrsos’ [unseemly pathos]: the artists there-
fore, in order to reconcile the significative and ennobling qualities of his soul,
put him into a posture, allowing for the sufferings that were necessary, next to
a state of tranquility.”177 Such an appraisal could not be farther from Diderot’s
dictum that the passions must be portrayed in as extreme a state as a subject
could support.178

171 La Harpe (1799–1804) 2: 79.    172 La Harpe (1799–1804) 2: 82–3.

173 La Harpe (1799–1804) 2: 72–3.
174 See Winckelmann (1972) 72; I’ve translated “stille” as “calm” rather than the translator’s
“sedate.” For introductions to his thought, see Potts (1994), Décultot (2000), and Harloe (2013).
175 Winckelmann (1972) 72.
176 See Simon Richter (1992) 45–7. Also see Weissberg (1989) and Budelman (2007).
177 Winckelmann (1972) 73.
178 Pensées détachées in Diderot (1996) 1023.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 157

Fig. 3.1. The Laocoön as it was seen in the eighteenth century, showing Canova’s restor-
ation with Montorsoli’s right, out-thrust arm of the father and Cornacchini’s right arm of
the younger son.
Vatican Museums. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

When Winckelmann describes the group again in his 1764 History of the Art of
Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums), having by that time seen it, he places
more stress on Laocoön’s resistence. The priest’s dire circumstances and extreme
agony are not so much the object of the sculptor’s representation as a presence that
leads us to impute what is absent, a sovereign self, a plenitude of being on the brink
of extinction: “Laocoön is an image of the most intense suffering . . . . But in the rep-
resentation of this intense suffering is seen the determined spirit of a great man who
struggles with necessity and strives to suppress all audible manifestations of pain.”179

179 Winckelmann (1972) 125. Potts (1994) 4–5 and 138 discusses the relationship between the
sovereign self and violent self-assertion in Winckelmann.
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158 What Was Tragedy?

He then draws an unfavorable comparison between this restraint and the exaggerated
style of expression found in Charles Le Brun’s 1668 Conference on Understanding
How to Draw the Passions (Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière), which
was so influential on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century dramatists and
actors (Fig. 3.2).180 Had subsequent critics heeded Lessing’s objection in Laocoön
(1766) that sculpture and theater face different limits and that the laments, cries,
and wild curses of Philoctetes certainly had been heard in the Greek theater, literary
history might have taken a different turn.181 But the appeal of Winckelmann’s
interpretation was irresistible to the proponents of the new philosophy of the
tragic. Weighing Winckelmann and Lessing in the balance, Johann Gottfried Herder
affirmed Winckelmann’s emphasis on the resistance of Philoctetes, not his expres-
sions of pathos: “who in the grasp of pain fights his pain, restrains it with hollow
sighs, as long as he can, and finally, since the Ach! the terrible Weh! overwhelm him,
still only emits single, stolen sounds of suffering, and hides the rest of his soul.”182

Fig. 3.2. Charles Le Brun, Acute bodily pain (La Douleur corporelle et aiguë). Pen, black ink,
and black chalk on white paper, 19.7 x 25.4 cm. INV28306 recto. Musée du Louvre.
Photo Credit: © RMN‑Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

180 Winckelmann (1972) 125.    181 Lessing (1984) 8.

182 Kritisches Wäldchen in Herder (1877–1913) 3: 13, quoted and translated in Simon Richter
(1992) 115.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 159

Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, an early champion of Shakespeare in Germany

and a forerunner of the Storm and Stress movement, approved of Herder’s emphasis
in a review of 1769. Conceding that Philoctetes did make a tremendous outcry in
the play, he nevertheless insisted that his expression of pain was not essential to the
tragedy, whereas his inner fortitude was.183
In Winckelmann’s ecphrases, the capacity of Greek art to disclose an absent
signified behind the material work, to reveal a spiritual power within the vesture
of the flesh, is vital.184 A similar desire to linger on the sensual only in order that
it may yield to the super-sensual leads Friedrich Schiller to declare that the por-
trayal of “mere suffering” can never be the end of tragedy. Without denying that
“Philoctetus fills the Greek stage with his lamentations” and that “even the furious
Hercules does not suppress his pain,” Schiller argues in On the Pathetic (1793),
yet another essay that dwells on the conjoined examples of Laocoön and Philoc-
tetes, that the deep and vehement suffering of the “sensuous being” is important
in tragedies only because it permits the “rational being” to “testify to its independ-
ence” and present itself “by acting.” Nothing concerned with sensuous nature,
including emotions of the “highest intensity,” is, with respect to itself, worthy to
be portrayed; passions are “devoid of aesthetic value” and “beneath the dignity of
the art of tragedy.” The “maudlin emotions” stirred up by many modern tragedies
have no effect but “to empty the tear ducts and pleasurably alleviate the vascular
system.” The pathetic is “aesthetic” only in so far as it is “sublime,” forcing our sen-
suous nature to feel its limits even as it permits our “rational nature” to feel “its
superiority, its freedom from limits.”185 Pathos, in other words, is no longer the
one indispensable element of tragedy; it is a portal to the noumenal realm. Friedrich
Schelling affirms in the same spirit, “Only with the maximum of suffering can that
principle be revealed in which there is no suffering, just as everywhere things
are revealed only in their opposites.”186 Such claims are not limited to German
critics. We find them even in France, where Winckelmann was so ardently admired
during the French Revolution that his papers were brought to Paris, the true seat
of liberty.187 Consider the chevalier de Jaucourt’s article on the Laocoön written
for the Encylopédie:
Laocoön suffers a great deal, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles: his misfor-
tune [malheur] penetrates us to the bottom of our soul but we wish at the same time
for the power to withstand [supporter] the misfortune as this great man withstands it:
the expression of a soul so sublime greatly surpasses the representation of nature. It
was needful that the artist of this expression felt in himself the force of courage that
he wanted to impress in marble. This is another advantage of ancient Greece: that it
possessed artists and philosophers in the same persons. Wisdom lent its hand to art,
placing in figures souls elevated above common souls.188

183 Deutsche Literaturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts 128: 183–95; Hatfield (1964) 84–6.
184 On this aspect of Winckelmann’s thought, see Stafford (1980).
185 On the Pathetic (1793) and On the Sublime (1793) in Schiller (1995) 47, 45, 48, 49, 22.
186 Schelling (1989) 89.
187 On Winckelmann’s reception in France, see Edouard Pommier (1989) and Décultot (2000).
188 Diderot and d’Alembert (1765), s.v. “Laocoön.”
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160 What Was Tragedy?

Beginning with a paraphrase of Winckelmann’s ecphrasis, Jaucourt forces a passage

from the natural to the spiritual, the mimetic to the philosophical.
Critics writing in the wake of publications like these feel no need to derogate all
Greek tragedies that feature remarkable displays of pathos, but they do re-describe
them. In his Philosophy of Art, which he developed from 1799 to 1805, drawing
heavily on the opinions of Schiller, Goethe, and the brothers Schlegel, Friedrich
Schelling maintains that it is “precisely at the moment of greatest suffering” that the
tragic hero “enters in to the greatest liberation and greatest dispassion.”189 Aeschylus’
Prometheus (who is “the archetype of the greatest human inner character, and
thereby also the true archetype of tragedy”) “does not suffer merely because of
external pain but rather much more deeply in his inner feeling of injustice and
oppression”; “freedom triumphs over necessity” because, whatever his “personal
suffering,” Prometheus is motivated strictly by “the universal rebellion” against
an “unbearable dominion.”190 For Schelling, the Greek chorus plays an indispens-
able role in preventing the audience from becoming too involved in the suffering
of the hero by anticipating their “emotional movement,” “participation,” and
“reflection.” By exhibiting a capacity for “free contemplation,” the chorus raise
themselves “above the fearsome and painful” and “beyond the initial violence of
fear and pain.” They provide “a continuous means of comfort and reconciliation
within the tragedy” because they guide spectators to a “more serene reflection”
and embody their pain in an objectivized form, where it can be beheld “already
mitigated.”191
It should not surprise us to find substantial overlap between the views of
Schelling and August Wilhelm Schlegel, for they were both profoundly influenced
by Winckelmann, and Schelling wrote his lectures with a manuscript of Schlegel’s
1801–4 Beautiful Literature and Art (Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst)
in hand. In his subsequent Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808), Schlegel
tells his audience not only that Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity has
“deeply penetrated into the spirit of Grecian art” but that “it is only before the
groups of Niobe or Laocoön that we first enter into the spirit of the tragedies of
Sophocles.”192 Schlegel admires these sculptures because their figures are “grouped
by an action” (though in fact, the proper placement of the Niobe figures remains a
matter of scholarly speculation). They display beauty in action “even while por-
traying the most violent bodily or mental anguish” only because the artist finds
“means to temper the expression by some trait of manly resistance, calm grandeur,
or inherent sweetness . . . ”:
The comparison with ancient tragedy is the more apposite here, as we know that both
Æschylus and Sophocles produced a Niobe, and that Sophocles was also the author of
a Laocoön. In the group of the Laocoön the efforts of the body in enduring, and of
the mind in resisting, are balanced in admirable equipoise. . . . The wreathed serpents
represent to us that inevitable destiny which often involves all the parties in an action
in one common ruin.

189 Schelling (1989) 254.    190 Schelling (1989) 261.

191 Schelling (1989) 259–60.    192 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 48.
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Simple Pathetic Tragedy 161

Schlegel does not deny the emotional effect of these statue groups, but he stresses
that “amid all the agitating emotions which these groups give rise to,” there is still
something in their aspect that leads us to contemplation, and so likewise tragedy
leads us to “reflections on the nature and inexplicable mystery of man’s being.”193
For Schlegel, as for Schelling, the chorus play a key role in that process, for as an
“ideal spectator” they mitigate “the impression of a heart-rending or moving story”
while conveying “to the actual spectator a lyrical or musical expression of his own
emotions,” thus “[elevating] him to the region of contemplation.”194
In his readings of the Ajax and Philoctetes, Schlegel emphasizes Ajax’s “complete
return of consciousness,” his “cool deliberation,” and his “free action” in commit-
ting suicide rather than the scenes that appealed to an older school of criticism: “the
pathetic situation” when Ajax recovers from his furor in the company of his son and
wife; his despair when he determines to kill himself; and “the tragic picture” pre-
sented by the bootless arrival of Teucer and “the dolor of Tecmessa and the Chorus
at the spectacle of Ajax dead.”195 On the question of Philoctetes’ bodily sufferings,
Schlegel predictably throws his weight behind Winckelmann: “Winckelmann was
correct in affirming that the Philoctetes of Sophocles, like the Laocoön in the cele-
brated group, suffers with the suppressed agony of an heroic soul never altogether
overcome by his pains.”196 The period of the simple pathetic tragedy was drawing to
a close. From now on, critics would take care to distinguish the “merely pathetic”
from the truly tragic.197

193 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 76–7.    194 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 70.

195 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 106; Napoli-Signorelli (1813 [1787–90]) 1: 110.
196 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 109.
197 This tradition runs well into the twentieth century and lies behind the claim in Whitman
(1951) 78–9 that the Ajax is “one long paean of triumphant individualism” that embodies “a new kind
of metaphysical conflict” that “might be called the conflict of free will and determinism.”
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4
Operatic Discoveries
The Complex Tragedy with a Happy Ending

In his 1755 Essay on the Opera (Saggio sopra l’opera in musica), the cosmopolitan
polymath Francesco Algarotti assumed that it was common knowledge that the
origins of opera lay in the desire “to revive the Greek tragedy in all its luster and
to introduce Melpomene on our stage, attended by music, dancing, and all that
imperial pomp with which, at the brilliant period of Sophocles and Euripides, she
was wont to be escorted.”1 Had he felt compelled to cite documentary evidence, he
might have pointed to the prefaces and prologues to Euridice (1600), the first sur-
viving opera, in which the poet Ottavio Rinuccini and the composers Jacopo Peri
and Giulio Caccini, who published rival settings of the libretto, competed for the
honor of having been the first to recover the style of singing “used by the ancient
Greeks when introducing songs into the presentations of their tragedies and other
fables.”2 Or if he had preferred to begin with the operatic tradition of his native
Venice, he might have observed that the librettos for Claudio Monteverdi’s first
operas there, The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland (Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria,
1641) and The Marriage of Aeneas (Le Nozze d’Enea, 1641), declare themselves tra-
gedies on their title pages. Indeed, Michelangelo Torcigliani, a member of the
Accademia degli Incogniti and the author of Le Nozze, prefaces the latter with a
treatise on tragedy.3 The intervening century had done little to convince poets
that opera was a distinct genre that bore no comparison to tragedy. In 1736, for
example, Algarotti’s friend Voltaire expressed his ardent wish that his Samson might
be a true “tragedy in the style of antiquity,” an “opera filled with spectacle, with
majesty and terror.” He would answer for the success of the venture if only
Jean-Philippe Rameau, who had just made his debut as a composer of tragédie en
musique with Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), would “combine his beautiful music with
some arias in a modified Italian style,” thus uniting the most persuasive elements
of the French and Italian operatic traditions in a single master-work.4
Yet since the nineteenth century some of the most influential historians of
opera have denied a meaningful connection between the tragedy of the ancients

1 Algarotti (1767 [1755]) 12.

2 Giulio Caccini, Dedication to L’Euridice composta in musica in stile rappresentativo (Florence,
1600), in Murata, ed. (1998) 100. Also see Jacopo Peri, Preface to Le musiche sopra L’Euridice (Florence,
1601) in Murata, ed. (1998) 151–4; and Ottavio Rinuccini, Dedication to Euridice (Florence, 1600),
in Strunk, ed. (1950) 367–8. On the use of prologues as generic signals, see Hanning (1980).
3 Torcigliani (2007) 385–91.    4 Voltaire (1953–65), letter 940, February 2, 1736.
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Operatic Discoveries 163

and the efforts of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century composers to

­arrive at styles of musical text setting that were intensely dramatic and expressive.
These could be employed in monodies, duets, madrigals, sacred concerti, or stage
representations, and they could range from the speech-like stile recitativo, through
the reportorial stile narrativo, to the more dramatic and pathetic stile espressivo.
The stile rappresentativo referred to the use of these interrelated styles of musical
text setting in dramatic performances.5 Opera historians who deny a connection
between ancient tragedy and this operatic style of theatrical representation do not
content themselves with observing that Caccini and Peri could study only a few
extant examples of ancient music, none of them drawn directly from Attic tra-
gedies; they maintain that baroque audiences demanded even of dramatic texts
something that was “not true tragedy but a mixed genre.” According to the emi-
nent musicologist Claude Palisca, Rinuccini and his circle, who were “steeped
in the classics,” knew perfectly well that the musico-dramatic form they created
was not “a rebirth of ancient tragedy.”6 The classicist Michele Napolitano goes
further: “those who have cited the absolute irreducibility of the two cultural
phenomena”—tragedy and opera—“must have hit the right mark.” For the first
operas were ­pastorals, and even Wagner is a “completely isolated example, the
only case of a profound and original rethinking of the legacy of ancient tragedy”
before the twentieth century.7
Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Theodore Adorno lie behind histor-
ical narratives like these, which define tragedy and opera as inherently opposed
modes of representation. In his 1872 The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie
aus dem Geiste der Musik), Nietzsche measures the “thoroughly externalized operatic
music” of the Florentine Camerata against Arthur Schopenhauer’s requirement that
music be an “immediate copy of the will itself ” and is therefore puzzled how such
an imitation of phenomena “could be received and cherished with enthusiastic
favor, as a rebirth, as it were, of all true music.” “Because he does not sense the
­Dionysian depth of music,” Nietzsche says of the renaissance Florentine,
he changes his musical taste into an appreciation of the understandable word-and-
tone-rhetoric of the passions in the stile rappresentativo, and into the voluptuousness
of the arts of song. Because he is unable to behold a vision, he forces the machinist and
the decorative artist into his service. Because he cannot comprehend the true nature of
the artist, he conjures up the “artistic primitive man” to suit his taste, that is, the man
who sings and recites verses under the influence of passion.8

5 These terms are not used with consistency in the seventeenth century, but G. B. Doni attempts
to stabilize them in his Trattato della musica scenica (1633–35) and his Annotazioni sopra il Compendio
de’ generi e de’ modi della musica (1640); see Carter (2015).
6 I quote Palisca (1968) 29, 36. Strohm (2010) 160 observes in a similar spirit that the first operas
“did not at all resemble tragedies and comedies if regarded as literary texts.” For similar views see
­Pirrotta (1954a) 188 and (1954b) 295; Pirrotta and Povoledo (1982) 201, 268; and (summarizing
the views of others) Hanning (1973) 241. For other accounts that emphasize the inter-relationship of
the stile recitativo with related contemporary musical forms, see Fortune (1953); Palisca (1960); and
­Tomlinson (1981).
7 Napolitano (2010) 44, 40.    8 Nietzsche (1967) 114, 116–17.
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164 What Was Tragedy?

After quoting this passage at much longer length and with evident relish, Benjamin
applies its lessons to the “dissolution of the Trauerspiel into opera” in the
late seventeenth century. The language of the Trauerspiel, says Benjamin, should
always display a tension between “meaning-laden speech” and its opposite, music.
Once the “operatic character” of this dramaturgy gained the upper hand, the
Trauerspiel could not persist. For “just as every comparison with tragedy—not
to mention musical tragedy—is of no value for the understanding of opera,” so
it is that from the point of view of literature, and especially the Trauerspiel, opera
must seem ­unmistakably to be a product of decadence. In opera, the dramatic
structure is “emptied,” the scenic organization becomes “a hollow façade,” and,
in the absence of some obstructing force, mourning, the soul of the Trauerspiel,
dissolves.9
We find much the same claim rehearsed in Adorno’s influential essay “Bourgeois
Opera.” Adorno’s antipathy to what Nietzsche termed “the culture of the opera” is
such that he must erect a mythical version of tragedy as its antinomy, a version
whose heroes never sang:
The heroes of Attic tragedy, from which opera is separated by a historical and philo-
sophical chasm, had no need to sing. Through the impact of the tragic process on the
omnipresent myth, the meaning—the emancipation of the human subject from its
mere place in nature—revealed itself directly. It would not have occurred to anyone to
confuse the heroes of the tragic stage with empirical people, since of course what takes
place in them and through them is nothing less than the birth of Man himself.
Opera, in contrast, shaped to an equal extent by Christianity and modern rationality,
has from its very inception had to do with empirical people, namely, those who are
reduced to their mere natural essence. This accounts for its peculiar costume-quality:
mortals are disguised as heroes or gods, and this disguise is similar in its function to
their singing. Through song they are exalted and transfigured. The process becomes
specifically ideological in that it represents the transfiguration of everyday existence;
something that merely is presents itself as if its simple being were already greater, as if
social orders—as mirrored in operatic convention—were identical with the order of
the absolute and the world of ideas.10
Adorno’s account of “the historical and philosophical chasm” that divides tragedy
and opera is deeply indebted not just to the post-Kantian philosophy of the tragic
but to the philosophy of history that underwrites it. Tragedy “emancipates” the
human subject from its “mere place in nature” because it embodies Kant’s second
antinomy, the necessity of assuming moral freedom in the face of necessity. Not
only does Adorno define the spirit of opera in opposition to that of tragedy as an
art of costuming rather than of scattering phenomena, of singing rather than of
silence before a terrible knowledge, he implicitly posits a Hegelian progression of
ages from the heroic ancient world to bourgeois modern society, whose besetting
illness is the “culture industry.”
In histories of opera that tacitly accept Adorno’s historical narrative, opera is
conceived as a distinct modern species that took peculiar forms in the native soils

9 Benjamin (1998) 212–13.    10 Adorno (1999) 24.

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Operatic Discoveries 165

of Italy, France, Germany, and Russia while following its own laws. In this grand
narrative, which sees opera as an activity seeking to become itself, much of the
­operatic repertoire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gets left behind, for
it is too often cosmopolitan rather than national, aristocratic rather than bourgeois,
beholden to the machinist rather than dedicated exclusively to the spirit of music.
Even critics who have set out to rehabilitate this repertoire have often chosen to do
so by accepting the categories of Nietzsche and Benjamin before transvaluing them.
To be sure, they say, this is opera without drama. It is tragedy as comedy and spec-
tacle. It is the extravagant art. But that is what makes it special.11
I want to reconsider both the prevailing consensus that early modern opera
could not have been mistaken for a rebirth of ancient tragedy and the more
sweeping assertion that the spirit of tragedy and the spirit of opera are polar oppos-
ites. What lies behind both beliefs is a narrow and historically indefensible idea
of tragedy derived from a handful of plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles. It is
well to remember that between 472 bc, when Aeschylus created The Persians, and
401 bc, when Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus was produced posthumously, no
fewer than 680 tragedies were presented at the Greater Dionysia in Athens. Of
these, we have only a tiny selection edited by Roman grammarians for their pupils
in the second century ad: seven plays each by Aeschylus and Sophocles and ten
by Euripides. These are supplemented by a single volume of Euripides’ tragedies
and satyr plays arranged in alphabetical order from epsilon to iota and containing
Helen, Electra, Heracles, The Children of Heracles, The Cyclops, The Suppliant Women,
Ion, Iphigenia in Aulis, and Iphigenia in Tauris. The selection of the grammarians
was probably motivated by multiple considerations, including the relationship
of plays to the Homeric material that students would already have studied and
their suitability for teaching Greek. But there is no reason to suppose that it
offered a fair representation of classical tragedy. Indeed, if we had only their selec-
tion to go on (without the supplementary evidence of the alphabetic volume),
we would conclude that Euripides was the most, not the least, prone among the
major tragedians to destroy his protagonists. There is every reason to suspect, as
William Marx has recently argued, that the selection of the Roman grammarians
was motivated by a Stoic concern with cosmic necessity and individual freedom
that post-dates the flowering of tragedy in Athens.12 This transmission history is
worth stressing for two reasons. First, because early modern humanists sought
to be empirical in their descriptions of tragedy, they tended to accord relatively
equal weight to every surviving text, with the result that, at least in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Euripides exercised a greater influence on their con-
ception of tragedy than the combined example of Aeschylus and Sophocles could:
His plays simply outnumbered theirs. Second, the random survival of Euripides’
alphabetic volume means that it may be more representative of Attic tragedy
than the highly curated anthology on which we depend for our other knowledge

11 See Freeman (1981); Heller (2010); and Lindenberger (1984). The title of Freeman’s book is a
pointed reversal of Kernan, Opera as Drama.
12 William Marx (2012) 71–83.
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166 What Was Tragedy?

of classical tragedy. Without similarly random selections from the works of

­Aeschylus and Sophocles, it is hard to say just how unrepresentative the second-
century anthology may have been of their work, and just how much of an outlier
Euripides may have been. But it is worth insisting that, by favoring Euripides’
alphabetic volume as the basis for their opera libretti, early moderns may not have
been retreating from the tragic but responding to tragedy as it was most commonly
performed in the fifth century bc and thereafter.
If we are prepared to accept (however tentatively) that the representation and
arousal of the passions might be a central aim of tragedy, and if we can imagine
esteeming Euripides’ style of musical dramaturgy before all others, then we may
begin to see early modern opera as a creative response to a particular set of Euripi-
dean tragedies and the ancient performance culture that valued them so highly.
I am not the first to see a connection between Euripidean tragedy and modern
opera. Indeed, in his lectures on European literature (1803), none other than
Friedrich Schlegel perceived an analogy, however damaging to the honor of
­Euripides in his eyes, between the effects of modern opera and the “lyrical-musical
passages” and “single beauties” to be found in Euripides; in another note of the
same year, he assigned Sophocles to “pure drama” and Euripides to the “musical
play,” or “romantic” drama.13 But since then, the importance of Euripides’ tragedies
with a happy ending to the rise of opera has been overlooked by music ­historians
investigating the connection between tragedy and early opera because the philosophy
of the tragic rejects their status as veritable tragedies. According to accounts like
August Wilhelm Schlegel’s and Nietzsche’s, they in fact embody the Alexandrian
culture of the opera that killed Attic tragedy. But once we take a more empirical
approach to the surviving corpus of Attic tragedies—and to the enduring popularity
of the new music of Euripides and his contemporary Timotheus in the ancient
world—the generative role that these tragedies played in the invention of opera
becomes more readily perceptible.
Euripides was not, to be sure, the only ancient author who inspired early modern
operas. Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca all played an important part in defining the
­essence of tragedy for opera audiences—and their contributions are not always
easily disentangled from those of Euripides.14 But in this chapter I content myself
with recuperating the Euripidean tradition because doing so will unsettle a series
of common assumptions that should not go unexamined: first, that Euripidean
dramaturgy is not tragic because it is devoted to pathos and relies on ocular effects,
representational music, and earthly compensations; second, that true tragedies
must end badly, destroying the world of appearances manifest in the voices of the
singers, the costumes of the dancers, and the theatrical scenes of the machinists;
third, that a work of genius should be a living organism rather than a beautifully
designed artifact; and finally, that tragedy should preside over the awakening con-
science of a nation. I defer consideration of the last two points until my concluding
analysis of Mozart’s Idomeneo (Munich, 1781).

13 Friedrich Schlegel (1958–) 9: 81ff.; 16: 516; Behler (1986) 353.

14 On the importance of Roman authors to early opera, see Ketterer (2009).
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Operatic Discoveries 167

D I D T R A G I C H E RO E S S I N G ?

From the mid-sixteenth century, commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics began to

diminish the authority of Plato’s theatrical and musical strictures, which required
that music be used to soothe and moderate the emotions. By defining tragedy as
an imitation that, “by means of pity and fear, accomplishes the catharsis of such
emotions” (1449b27–8; my trans.), the Poetics offered a viable defense of extreme
theatrical affect, and by describing the catharsis produced by listening to the
enthusiastic music of the aulos at sacred rites and tragic festivals, the Politics (1342a)
suggested that music might be an essential element of tragedy’s mastery of the pas-
sions. But which parts of ancient tragedy had been musical, and in what sense?
The starting point for any answer to this question had to be the definition of
tragedy found in the Poetics:
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action which is serious, complete, and has bulk,
in speech that has been made attractive [ôdtrlåm{ kæc{], using each of its species
­separately in the parts of the play. . . . (By “speech that has been made attractive” I mean
speech that has rhythm [˜thløm] and melody [qlom¨am] [and song [låko|]] attached
to it; and by “each of its species separately” I mean that some sections of the play are
carried forward by verses alone and some the other way round, by song.) (1449b24–31;
trans. Else)
Although this definition suggested that tragedies were declaimed in part and sung
in part, it shed little light on where the divisions lay. Moreover, its key terms could
be interpreted variously. Did rhythm refer to poetic meter or to dance rhythm?
And should Aristotle’s second term, which means most literally “tuning” or “tonos,”
be more properly rendered mode, melody, or harmony? By the late sixteenth century,
humanists had converged on a list of ancient sources that promised to shed light
on such questions. These included the texts of the plays themselves, which con-
tained metrical clues and meta-theatrical references to the performance of music;
Aristophanes’ comedies, which contained substantial discussions and parodies of
Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ musical styles; the Aristotelean Problems; Horace’s Art of
Poetry, which credits Thespis with discovering tragedy and carrying his pieces “in
wagons to be sung and acted [canerent agerentque] by players with faces smeared by
wine-lees” (ll. 275–7); Pseudo-Plutarch’s On Music (De musica); Plutarch’s Convivial
Questions (Questiones conviviale); the rhetorical treatises of Cicero and Quintilian;
Suetonius’ Life of Nero; the writings of Pollux and Athenaeus; the lexicon known
variously as the Suda or Suidas; and Donatus’ commentary on Terence.15 Although
this collocation of evidence was suggestive, it was also susceptible to varied inter-
pretation, and humanists arrived at a wide range of opinions about the role of
music in the ancient theater. For example, Giovanni Giorgio Trissino (c. 1549)
interpreted Aristotle to mean that dancing and singing with the rhythm of dance
could be introduced periodically into the action as forms of imitation that supple-
mented the verse dialogue, while choruses made use of verse and harmony without

15 Horace (1926), trans. Fairclough.

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168 What Was Tragedy?

the rhythm of dance. Giovan Battista Giraldi suggested, on the other hand, that
tragic prologues used speech only; that the first chorus used verse, melody, and
rhythm together, presumably because the chorus had to march into the theater; that
the remaining choruses used verse and melody only; and that the episodes were
spoken. Piero Vettori asserted in 1560 that Greek actors had recited or intoned
(cantilena) to the accompaniment of an aulos or lyre, but he differentiated this style
of delivery from true song (canticum), which was reserved for the chorus.16
Yet the Aristotelian Problems suggested that song might have played an even
more extensive role in the Attic theater than Vettori’s gloss on the Poetics contem-
plated. The Problems were known and used by commentators such as Francesco
Robortello and Vettori, but three humanists drew more radical conclusions from
them. These were Girolomo Mei, who sent the fourth book of his treatise On
the Modes of Ancient Music (De modis musicis antiquorum) to his former teacher
Vettori in 1573; Mei’s correspondent Vincenzo Galilei, who popularized many of
his conclusions in his 1581–82 Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music (Dialogo . . .
della musica antica, et della moderna); and Francesco Patrizi, a Paduan humanist who,
following the encyclopedic schemes of music proposed by Aristides Quintilianus
and the Byzantine Michael Psellus, treated poetry as a subdivision of music.17
Like Mei and Galilei, Patrizi attached particular value to Problem 48 (which he
numbers 47):
Why do the choruses in the tragedy not sing Hypodorian nor Hypophrygian? It is
because these harmoniai have the least melos, which the chorus uses most of all. And
the Hypophrygian has a practical character. Hence in the Gerion the exode and the
arming was done in that harmonia. The Hypodorian has a magnanimous and constant
character, and for this reason this harmonia is the most suitable of all to kitharody.
Both these things are unsuited to the chorus and are more appropriate for those on
stage. Because they are imitators of heroes, and only the leaders of the ancients played
the heroes, where the populace was made up of (common) men.18
Mei (followed by Galilei) believed that references to the Hypophrygian and Hypo-
dorian tonoi must be emended to the Phrygian and the Dorian because the former
were unknown in Aristotle’s day, while the latter are described in similar terms in
Politics 8.8–9.1342a–b.19 Patrizi let the manuscripts stand. For our purposes, what
is important is that the Problem proceeds to explain that a plaintive and quiet char-
acter and melos is appropriate to a chorus of common men, while the Hypophrygian
and the Hypodorian (or Phrygian and Dorian, as Mei and Galilei prefer) are active
and therefore suitable for actors rather than the chorus, which serves the function
of an “idle guardian.” Its assertion that actors naturally wish to use harmoniai
suited to kitharodes may be a glancing reference to tragic roles (such as Orpheus,
Thamyris, Euneus, and Amphion) in which the hero’s prowess as a m ­ usician was

16 These and other views are reviewed in Palisca (1985b) ch. 14.
17 See Mei (1960); Galilei (2003); Patrizi (1969–71 [1586]). On Mei’s and Patrizi’s inferences from
Aristotle, see Palisca (1985b) 412–26. Also see Csapo and Slater (1995) and Savage (2010).
18 Patrizi, Della Poetica, 1: 331–2, trans. from Italian into English in Palisca (1985b) 413–14.
19 Palisca (1985b) 419; Mei (1960) 178–9; Galilei (2003) 363.
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Operatic Discoveries 169

integral to the tragic action and demonstrated by his performance of hexameter

monodies to the accompaniment of the lyre. Although they have been lost, Aes-
chylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all wrote examples of such tragedies, and renais-
sance humanists certainly knew that Sophocles had been portrayed grasping a lyre
in the Painted Stoa, perhaps as a tribute to his famous performance of the role
of Thamyris.20 Problem 19.15 seemed to affirm that the ancients distinguished
between the songs of the actors and the songs of the chorus, for it explained that
although individual actors were able to perform long imitative songs, choruses,
which were made up of common citizens who had to sing in unison, could per-
form only simpler antistrophic music (just as hymns written for congregations
must be easy to learn and repetitive).
Problem 31 seemed, finally, to shed light on the evolution of music in the tragic
theater by asking, “Why were those around Phrynis (that is, Phrynis) more than
anything melopoets? Was it because at that time there were more mele in the meters
of the tragedies[?]” Patrizi suggests that even in the iambics and anapaests of his
tragedies, Phrynis had used “harmonies, songs, and mele in the manner of the
melopoets” but that strophes and antistrophes were reserved for the chorus, as was
Euripides’ practice. The fact that Phrynis was elected captain of Athens because its
citizens admired his ability to compose melodies suited to pyrrhic and bellicose
verses provided further circumstantial evidence that the active parts of his tra-
gedies, and not just the choruses, had employed melopoeic modes and songs. By
the time Aristotle wrote his Poetics, Patrizi conceded, tragedy was probably per-
formed as a mixture of spoken and sung verse. But there had been a time when it
was sung throughout. “It is clear that the tragedies were sung in performance,” he
concluded, after casting his nets wide enough to catch the scattered testimonies of
Roman authors. “Moreover, taking all these testimonies together many things are
to be noted. There were teachers who taught how to use the voice, to increase its
size, to preserve it, and they were called phonasci; that in the theater nomoi were
sung; that the tragedies were sung with high and big voice and, as Cicero said,
tragoedorum.”21
Classicists today might wish to emend or qualify many of Patrizi’s specific
claims, but his general insistence on the musical quality of ancient tragedy and on
the honed skills of its performers has stood the test of time. Most believe that in the
Athens of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, actors spoke iambic trimeters (the
dominant meter of tragic dialogue), chanted or intoned when delivering anapaests,
and sang monodies in moments of particular intensity. It would appear that by the
third century bc (and in some cases earlier), musicians were composing melodies
even for the iambic verse of the actors.22 So if the Florentine Camerata’s vision of
ancient tragedy as a through-composed performance was an inaccurate view of

20 Hall (2006) 300.

21 Patrizi, Della Poetica, 1: 332–6; Palisca (1985b) 416–17. For a relatively recent account of the
importance of vocal production, see Hunningher (1956).
22 Hall (2006) 299, citing Lucian, On Dance 27, Suetonius, Nero 47, Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music
1140f–41a.
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170 What Was Tragedy?

the fifth century bc, it may have been true enough of some Hellenistic and Roman
performances.
All three of the tragedians whose works survive in more than fragments wrote
songs for their tragic personages. In Aeschylus’ Persians, the first surviving tragedy,
Xerxes never speaks a single iambic trimeter. The roles that Sophocles wrote for
Ajax, Heracles, Oedipus, Antigone, Creon, Electra, and Philoctetes are likewise
intensely musical. But no tragedian enjoyed a higher—or more controversial—
reputation for his music in the ancient world than Euripides. Plutarch recorded
that one of Euripides’ songs saved Athens from destruction at the conclusion of
the Peloponnesian War in 404 bc. The Theban general Erianthus proposed to raze
Athens and sell its citizens into slavery. But at a banquet where the Spartan Lysander
and his allies among the Corinthians and Thebans were assembled, an Athenian
named Phocion melted the conquerors by performing the parodos of Euripides’
Electra, in which the chorus address Electra and she responds in a sung lament.23
Lucian provided even stranger evidence of the power of Euripides’ music. A per-
formance of his Andromeda had such a spectacular effect on the town of Abdera that
it sent the population into a fever, causing the townspeople to sing the roles of Per-
seus and Andromeda in the streets and to dream fitfully of Perseus holding Medusa’s
head.24 It is no accident that these stories pay tribute to the power of Euripides’
music, rather than to the effectiveness of his tightly knit plots, for his popularity in
Hellenistic Greece depended in part on his early adoption of the musical innov-
ations of Timotheus, whom most ancient critics placed at the threshold of the
archaic and the “modern” music of antiquity.25
Not everyone wished to see that threshold crossed. When the Aeschylus of The
Frogs charges Euripides with having introduced Cretan monodies to the tragic
stage (l. 849), his jibe may be targeted directly at monodies sung by Aerope and
Pasiphae in Euripides’ lost tragedies The Cretan Women and the Cretan Men, for the
former is wracked by an incestuous passion and the latter by an unnatural desire
for a bull; but it may also refer, more generally, to his use of songs accompanied by
mimetic dance.26 Whereas by his own account Aeschylus drew his music from
“noblest sources for noblest ends,” Euripides “draws his melos from harlot-songs,
from Carian aulos music, skolia of Meletos, dirges, dance music” (ll. 1298–1307).27
Although it is not easy to follow all these complaints or to see why dirges should
be inappropriate for tragedy, Aeschylus seems to charge Euripides with the con-
tamination of heroic music with erotic laments, with songs suited for symposia,
and with dirges fit for paid mourners.28 The charge is consistent with the com-
plaint of ancient critics that Euripides and Timotheus corrupted tradition, becoming
“more vulgar and more innovative, pursuing the popular and what is now called

23 Lysander 15 in Plutarch (1917) 4: 273.

24 How to Write History 1 in Lucian (1959) 6: 3, 5.    25 Csapo and Wilson (2009).
26 Aristophanes, The Frogs, ll. 849–50, 944. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are from
Aristophanes (1968).
27 I follow the translation of Mathiesen (1999) 123–4.
28 For commentary on these lines, see Dover, ed. (1993) 350–1.
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Operatic Discoveries 171

the ‘commercial’ style.”29 Yet from the fourth century bc to the third century AD,
no tragic poet was performed or quoted more frequently than Euripides, and no
lyric poet enjoyed as many revivals in the ancient theaters as Timotheus. Both men
abandoned restraint in favor of an expanded tonal range, the flexible mixing of
modes and structures, tone painting, melismas, impressionistic verse, and a deter-
mination to represent the most extreme experiences, like the birth pangs of Semele
or Kanake or the anguish and confusion of the blinded Polymestor, in musical
form. Their popularity promoted and in turn was served by the development of a
more commercial system of theatrical and musical performances which a­ ttracted
large audiences to hear traveling virtuosi perform highlights from their works
(much as singers today perform arias detached from their dramatic context).
The 240 lines of Timotheus’ Persians and the musical fragments of Iphigenia
in Aulis and Orestes that we have today (which may or may not be Euripides’ ori-
ginals) were not recovered from papyri until the twentieth century.30 Yet even
though the pioneers of early opera could not study Euripides’ music, they could
learn a great deal from the texts of his tragedies. One of their chief goals was to find
a style that, by synthesizing textual, musical, and expressive content, could harness
the power of both open and closed musico-poetic forms to speak a language of the
passions.31 Euripides’ restless experimentation shows that he was interested in
the same problem. In plays such as Alcestis (ll. 244–72, 393–415), Andromache
(ll. 1173–96), Electra (ll. 112–66), The Trojan Women (ll. 308–41), and Ion
(ll. 112–40), he includes a working song, a hymeneal, and ritual laments—all in
strophic form. But starting with the lament of the dying Hippolytus in the
Hippolytus (“O agony! And now the pain, the pain, comes over me!”; ll. 1370–88),
he experimented with the use of an astrophic poetic style whose transitions from
recitative to song and whose shifts in rhythm between anapaestic, dochmaic, and
iambic meter nimbly follow the movement of his character’s thoughts and the agi-
tation of his passions.32 He left numerous examples of such laments written with
varying degrees of structure, repetition, and variation. These include Hermione’s wish
for death in Andromache (ll. 825ff.); the blinded Polymestor’s disconnected shrieks
of agony, hatred, and bafflement in Hecuba (ll. 1056–1105), sputtered in no
fewer than six meters; Creusa’s anapaestic complaint to Apollo in the Ion
(ll. 859–922); Antigone’s polymetric lament for her dead kin in The Phoenician
Women (ll. 1485ff); a keen in which Helen sings the strophae, the chorus sings
the antistrophae, and she concludes with a long epode in iambo-trochaic (Helen
ll. 167–252); and Electra’s lament for her house in Orestes (ll. 982–1012).33

29 Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music 1132e, 1135c–d, quoted in Csapo and Wilson (2009) 281. Also see
Mathiesen (1999) 65–71, 102–25; T. B. L. Webster (1970) 132, 153–4, 171; Lawler (1964) 16–17.
30 Mathiesen (1999) 110–22; Lukas Richter (1983).
31 See Palisca (1954), (1985b) 147–8, and Palisca, ed. (1989) 57–61. Giovanni Bardi emphasizes
the importance of music serving text; see “On How Tragedy Should Be Performed,” in Palisca, ed.
(1989) 145.
32 All translations of Euripides are drawn from Euripides (1994–2003), trans. Kovacs.
33 A list of Greek monodies may be found in Barner (1971). L. P. E. Parker (1997) 514–18 offers
a succinct summary of the meters of Euripides’ monodies.
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172 What Was Tragedy?

­ uripides even wrote the messenger’s speech of Orestes as an agitated monody in

E
the new style—sung by a Phrygian slave unmanned by fear (ll. 1369–1502).
Perhaps there is no more revealing guide to the way that Euripides’ more con-
servative contemporaries viewed Euripides’ laments than the pastiche that the
character Aeschylus sings in The Frogs (ll. 1329–63).34 Like most great parodies, it
is a telling exaggeration. The distressed maiden begins with an apostrophe to
Night, sings of an ominous dream, finds that Glyce has abandoned her in the
night, thinks of what will never be, bewails Glyce’s flight again, then appeals to the
gods for assistance. Grammatical and rhythmic shifts between eight different
meters (more than Euripides actually uses in any surviving monody) signal her
agitation as she descends into incoherent grief. A single syllable may be sung as a
chromatic melisma with reduplicated vowels (ll. 1314, 1348). Yet amid all this
freedom there is structure, for text repetitions (esp. ll. 1352–5) permit her to defer
acceptance of her plight and serve as a reservoir of accumulating pathos.
Such laments assumed a special importance to renaissance theorists of the new
monodic style of singing such as Mei, Galilei, and Lorenzo Giacomini because their
classical sources closely connected monody and lament. A scholiast remarks on
Euripides’ Andromache that “a monody is the song of a character doing a thrēnos”
and the Suda glosses “to monodize” (monōdein) as “to threnodize” (to thrēnein): “for
all the songs from the stage in tragedy are properly thrěnoi.”35 Moreover, because the
emotional intensity of laments was calculated to move audiences to pity, they were
thought to be particularly crucial to tragedy’s cathartic function.36 Finally, I would
suggest that if Nicole Loraux is right to associate the mourning voice in Attic tra-
gedy with the “anti-political” (with unruly grief, the rejection of the civic duty
to forget, the audience’s recognition of themselves as mortals first, and citizens
­second), then it should not surprise us that early moderns, especially those who
were not living in republics, should gravitate toward the threnodic rather than the
overtly civic elements of Attic tragedy.37 The historical transmutation of political
systems had done little to make these elements evidently outdated; and in some
cases, their anti-political valence may have held an active appeal, since they could
remind audiences of values too often omitted from the political calculus, whether
of the Athenian polis or an absolute monarchy.
No matter which explanation we stress, Euripides’ laments, together with
their literary descendants in such works as Catullus 64 and Ovid’s Heroides, are
important classical models both for such highly expressive monodies as Rinuccini
and Monteverdi’s 1608 Lamento d’Arianna (with its naturalistic declamatory style,
its affective text repetitions, its choral responses, and its appearance of freedom from
superimposed formal structures) and for the more formally organized laments that

34 For commentaries on this monody, which poses various textual and metrical difficulties, see Rau
(1967) 131–6; Dover, ed. (1993) 358–63; and L. P. E. Parker (1997) 506–18.
35 Scholiast on Euripides’ Andromache and Suda, both cited in Hall (2006) 310 n. 83.
36 Rosand (2015).
37 See Loraux (2002). Other studies of ancient lament include Holst-Warhaft (1992); Dué (2006);
Foley (1993) and (2001); Alexiou (2002); and Suter, ed. (2008b). On the unruliness of mourning in
seventeenth-century French tragedy, see Merlin-Kajman (2000) ch. 6.
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Operatic Discoveries 173

lend a sense of gravity to mid seventeenth-century Venetian operas.38 By the time

Francesco Cavalli set Gian Francesco Busenello’s Didone (Venice, 1641), it had
already become his practice, thanks in part to the example of Monteverdi, to
­organize his musical dramas around a sequence of highly structured laments whose
sensuous vocal lines were underpinned by a descending ground bass and sung by
distressed heroines such as Cassandra, Ecuba, and Didone. His later operas Eris-
mena (1656) and Statira (1656) continue the pattern.39 Perhaps no musico-poetic
form exercised a more formative influence on the early development of opera.
Important though the formal example of Euripides’ laments was, however, the
heightened and specific meanings with which he invested the singing voice may
have constituted a yet more crucial dramatic legacy. As Edith Hall has argued,
­Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all contributed to the codification of a set of
conventional relationships between speakers, speech acts, meters, and forms of
musical expression on the tragic stage. These relationships went well beyond the
importation of sacred songs or ritual dirges for the dead, whose meaning was
­already laid down by custom. On the tragic stage, song is normally the prerogative
of mortals who are nobly born, and it seems to be the special province of women
and barbarians.40 Some of Sophocles’ male heroes, such as Ajax and Philoctetes,
undermine this rule, but Euripides seems to have been content to reassert many of
Aeschylus’ conventional associations between status, gender, and song while at the
same time expanding the dramatic situations that could be developed musically.
The example of Euripides was especially important to poets in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries because Aeschylus’ Greek was considered difficult
and his dramaturgy archaic. Sophocles was read and admired, to be sure, but
Euripides’ passionate women and knowing logicians seemed better suited to the
modern stage, and the reputation of his music in Hellenistic and Roman sources
was without peer.
Rather than catalogue all the conventional relationships that Euripides estab-
lished between musical expression and particular speech acts, let me suggest how
he used dramatic context to establish or naturalize such relationships. In Medea,
the heroine’s anguish surfaces in chanted anapaests heard from behind the scene—
“Oh, what a wretch am I, how miserable in my sorrows! Ah ah, how I wish I could
die!”—while her Nurse and Tutor, standing in front of her house, discuss her lan-
guishing condition. Her suffering indecision, always expressed in chant, punctuates
the opening dialogue like a refrain—“Oh, what sufferings are mine, sufferings that

38 Catullus 64, which is sometimes described as an epyllion, or diminutive epic, is the longest of
Catullus’ poems. Its narration of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis is interrupted by a long ecphrastic
description of a coverlet depicting Theseus’ desertion of Ariadne; for her lengthy lament, see Catullus
64, ll. 132–201. In the Heroides, Ovid assumes the voices of such Euripidean heroines as Phaedra and
Medea and of other heroines who feature prominently in seventeenth-century monodies and operas,
such as Penelope, Dido, and Ariadne. The music for the choral responses of the Lamento d’Arianna
does not survive, but the libretto clearly indicates their existence; see Solerti (1904) 2: 175–9. For an
essay that briefly remarks on the important role of monodies in Euripidean tragedy and then focuses on
the Latin sources of Ariadne’s lament, see Holford-Strevens (1999). Also see Rosand (1979); Tomlinson
(1981); and the special issue on laments that appeared in Early Music 27 (1999).
39 Glover (1978) 87–8.    40 Hall (2006) ch. 10.
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174 What Was Tragedy?

call for loud lamentation!”—until she emerges to present a calm exterior and to
speak, rather than sing, to the chorus (Medea, ll. 96–7, 111–13). In Hippolytus, on
the other hand, Phaedra’s step son and his chorus of servants enter singing to a
dance rhythm, then pay homage to Artemis. Their strength and chastity stand in
marked contrast to Phaedra’s wasted appearance as she lies on a couch and sings
languidly and feverishly of her desire to be in the woods where Hippolytus hunts.
In their different ways, both scenes contrast the public and the private, the visible
and the hidden. As they reveal the wavering of the women’s aims, they dilate time
in order to give scope to the emotions and thus to exploit fully the dramatic poten-
tial of internal, as opposed to physical, pathos. And they turn the singing voice into
a privileged means of expressing hidden passions.
Scenes like these consolidated what appears to have been a conventional associ-
ation between laments and the feminine voice.41 In Plato’s Republic, for example,
Socrates observes that “we should be right in doing away with the lamentations
of men of note and in attributing them to women, and not to the most worthy of
them either, and to inferior men, in order that those whom we say we are breeding
for the guardianship of the land may disdain to act like these” (3.387e–388a).42
Plutarch observes in his Consolation to Apollonius:
They say that the lawgiver of the Lycians ordered his citizens, whenever they mourned,
to clothe themselves first in woman’s garments and then to mourn, wishing to make it
clear that mourning is womanish and unbecoming to decorous men who lay claim
to the education of the free-born. Yes, mourning is verily feminine, and weak, and
ignoble, since women are more given to it than men, and barbarians more than
Greeks, and inferior men more than better men; and of the barbarians themselves, not
the most noble.43
And when Lucian was attending tragedies in Rome, he reported that it was toler-
able to hear Andromache and Hecuba “melodising” their “calamities” on stage but
risible to hear Heracles burst into song.44 Thanks to these enduring associations,
the vast majority of monodic laments published in the first decades of the seven-
teenth century were written for female characters portrayed by the soprano voice.45
But the association of abandoned women with song is just one of many that
­Euripides naturalized through sheer repetition. Although he may not have been the
first to think of setting a recognition scene as a sung duet (the uncertain date of
Sophocles’ Electra leaves the question open), he left the most numerous examples
of such duets in his late tragedies. In the Ion (ll. 1437–1509), Iphigenia among the
Taurians (ll. 827–99), and Helen (ll. 625–97), he showed how lyric dialogue could
be turned into a theatrical expression of intellectual discovery, spontaneous joy,

41 On the lament as peculiarly feminine in the Greek world, see Alexiou (2002); McClure (1993);
Loraux (1986); Holst-Warhaft (1992) and (2000); Hall (1993); Foley (2001); Derderian (2001). But
for a revisionist account that argues that males lament frequently and without consistent censure on
the tragic stage, see Suter (2008a).
42 Plato (1961) 632.
43 Consolation to Apollonius 22 in Plutarch (1927) 2: 165–7; Holst-Warhaft (1992) 98ff. cites
Plato, Plutarch, and similar ancient testimonies.
44 On Dance 27–8 in Lucian (1959) 5: 240.    45 Rosand (2015).
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Operatic Discoveries 175

and mutual feeling as parent and child, brother and sister, or husband and wife are
reunited, and he also demonstrated how such encounters could be gendered, for as
Hall notes, the women in such scenes must often labor to draw the men into
song.46 Euripides’ example paved the way for the sudden, expansive lyricism of
Penelope when she at last recognizes her husband in Bodoaro and Monteverdi’s
1641 The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland (Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Venice).
Such scenes of recognition were still receiving special musical treatment by the
time Christoph Willibald Gluck set Iphigénie en Tauride (Paris, 1779), but by then
poets and composers sometimes preferred to raise the expectation of joyful lyricism
only to confound it. In Apostolo Zeno and Geminiano Giacomelli’s La Merope
(Venice, 1734), for instance, the recognition that Farinelli’s character Epitide con-
fidently awaits does not transpire, and he is left to express his disappointment at
not being recognized by his spouse in the plaintive aria, “Sposa non mi conosci”;
while in Varesco and Mozart’s Idomeneo (Munich, 1781), the son’s joy at recovering
his father from the sea is undercut by the father’s horrible realization that he has
just vowed to sacrifice the first being he beholds on shore: his son. (It may be a
testament to the longevity of gender conventions that Mozart and his father both
felt that this recognition between father and son should be set, largely, as recitative,
however carefully wrought.)47
The priority that Euripides put on musical set-pieces pushed him toward a
form of dramatic construction that differs, say, from Sophocles’. Euripides often
slows the dramatic action in order to give scope to his characters’ passions in
song, then uses those songs, in turn, to structure his tragedies. The climactic
scene of Iphigenia in Aulis shows him doing this on a small scale: The hapless
girl, prompted by the prospect of death, sings an emotional lyric monody in
which she laments her father’s abandonment of her (ll. 1283–1335); then the
meter shifts to trochaic tetrameters as Achilles enters, and he and Clytemnestra
consider how to save her life; then Iphigenia, whose mind has been working
silently to untie the knot, interrupts them in mid line in order that she may sing
a triumphal song expressing her determination to die gloriously as a willing
victim (ll. 1475–99).48 Hippolytus shows him working on a larger scale and
using song to shift the pathetic and dramatic focus from Phaedra, who at first
complains of her love-pains; to Theseus, who mourns her death in dialogue
with the chorus; to the wounded Hippolytus, who dies singing an agonized
­lament near the end of the tragedy. In both plays, these songs stand out from
the surrounding action like monuments to particular passions. This method of
construction appealed even to the authors of declaimed tragedies in a century
when the abbé d’Aubignac could maintain that it was the proper business of
a tragedian to present a “gallery” of the passions, each developed “to the point

46 Hall (2006) 315.

47 For correspondence on this recognition scene, see Mozart to his Father, Munich, November 8,
1780; Mozart to his Father, Munich, December 19, 1780; Leopold Mozart to his Son, Salzburg,
­December 22, 1780; Mozart to his Father, Munich, December 27, 1780 in Mozart (1985).
48 Iphigenia’s “change of mind,” which Aristotle faults in the Poetics (1454a26–33), continues to be
a subject of critical debate. See Knox (1979) 243–4; Jasper Griffin (1990) 148; and Sansone (1991).
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176 What Was Tragedy?

of fulness.”49 For librettists, it provided a viable model for the dramatic arrange-
ment of action and reflection, speech and song, recitative and set-piece laments
and arias. Even some of opera’s harshest critics, such as Gian Vincenzo Gravina,
conceded the structural resemblance between ancient tragedies and modern o­ peras,
both of which depended on a rhythm of recitative and song to establish a tension
between nature and artifice.50 To be sure, early modern librettists did not adopt
all the conventions of the Attic stage. For instance, while having a Muse appear in
the theatrical machine lamenting over the corpse of her son seems to have been an
unorthodox experiment on the part of Euripides (Rhesus ll. 895–916), the idea that
deities should have a perfect command over their utterances seemed logical to early
moderns, who produced brightly musical roles for goddesses such as the Minerva
of Monteverdi’s Return of Ulysses to His Homeland (Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria). But
early moderns shared with Euripides the more fundamental conviction that asso-
ciations between the characteristics of the persons on stage, the situations in which
they found themselves, and modes of musical expression could furnish a natural
language of the passions.

E U R I P I D E S A N D T H E O P E R AT I C R E P E RTO I R E

The whole tenor of my argument suggests that Euripides’ contribution to early

modern opera should not be measured by the number of operas that are based dir-
ectly on his tragedies. After all, Ariadne or Dido can be made to lament like an
abandoned Euripidean heroine, and Jephthah or Idomeneo can play a part like
Agamemnon’s in Iphigenia in Aulis. A scene derived from a Euripidean tragedy
such as The Trojan Women may also appear in an opera whose primary sources are
otherwise Roman, as is the case in Busenello and Cavalli’s Didone (Venice, 1641).
But on the other hand, operas that are putatively based on Euripides’ tragedies may
in fact bear no deep resemblance to them. Aurelio Aureli’s 1660 Antigone Deceived
by Alcestis (L’Antigona delusa da Alceste, Venice) and 1661 The Fruitless Loves of
Pyrrhus (Gl’amori infruttuosi di Pirro, Venice) take their start from Alcestis and
Andromache, but their Euripidean origins are quickly obscured by the amorous
intrigues and comic subplots characteristic of Venetian operas of the seventeenth
century. Nevertheless, it remains instructive to consider which of Euripides’ tra-
gedies entered directly into the operatic repertoire before the end of the eighteenth
century.
I would like to defer consideration of his extant tragedies, however, and begin
with one of his lost plays, Andromeda, because I think its popularity reveals much
about what baroque librettists found attractive in Euripides. This was the tragedy
that filled the character Dionysus in The Frogs with “a sudden pang of longing,” a
“fierce desire” that threatened to consume him unless he could rescue Euripides
from Hades (ll. 52–4, 58–9). It was also the play that Alexander the Great was
said to have recited spontaneously at his last banquet (Athenaeus, Deipnosophists

49 d’Aubignac (1684) 3: 46.    50 Gravina (1973) 556, 560.

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Operatic Discoveries 177

537d–e). Early moderns would have had to base their idea of the play primarily on
the parody of it that, as the ancient scholiasts observed, could be found in Aris-
tophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria (ll. 1008–132).51 (Carlo Valgulio’s 1507
translation of Pseudo-Plutarch’s On Music and Nicolò Rossi’s 1590 Discourse on
Tragedy are just two early treatises that recognized that Aristophanes’ comedies and
their scholia could be mined for insights into the tragic stage.) Just enough could
be inferred about the contents of Andromeda to be suggestive. It contained the
striking spectacle of the forlorn Andromeda chained to the rocks, her flesh as white
as a statue’s. She lamented to the Night but, until a chorus of Ethiopian maidens
arrived to lament in lyric dialogue with her, she was answered only by the echo of
her voice resounding from the rocks (and sung from off-stage). She was eventually
rescued by Perseus, who made a memorable entrance from the machine.
The importance that the French Jesuit critic René Rapin accords to Andromeda
is telling. It is no surprise that Rapin should single out Oedipus the Tyrant, as we
saw in chapter 2, to illustrate the power of carefully prepared recognitions and
­reversals to subject an audience to a “flux and reflux of Indignation, and of Pity,” a
“Revolution of Horrour and of tenderness.” Yet he has scarcely finished demon-
strating the efficacy of such a complex plot before he adduces an instance proving
that stage spectacle and music may grip the imagination just as forcefully: “And
thus also it was, that the Andromeda of Euripides . . . wrought those wonderful
­Effects in the City of Abdera.” Referring to a legendary performance of the tragedy
by the Hellenistic actor Archelaus, Rapin says that “the two Parts of Perseus and
Andromeda, the Misfortunes of this Princess expos’d to the Sea-Monster, and all
that mov’d terrour and pity in this Representation, made so strong and violent an
impression on the people, That they departed, saith Lucian, from the Theatre, possess’d
(as it were) with the Spectacle, and this became a public Malady, wherewith the Imagin-
ations of the Spectators were seiz’d.” 52
Such accounts were enough to inspire numerous librettists to write versions of
the tale based on what was known of the tragedy and on its retelling in the Meta-
morphoses. It was staged in Bologna as a “Tragedia. Da recitarsi in Musica” (1610); in
Mantua, with a lost score by Monteverdi (1620); in Venice, where it was the first
work to be staged in a public opera house (1637); in Ferrara, where it gave Francesco
Giutti an occasion to employ his impressive stage machinery (1638); in Paris, where
it provided the vehicle for Pierre Corneille and Giacomo Torelli’s first attempt to
adapt Italian opera and Venetian stage-craft to French tastes (1650); in Madrid,
when the fourteen-year-old Infanta Maria Teresa, future wife of Louis XIV, com-
missioned Calderón de la Barca to produce the first fully sung Spanish opera (1653);
and in Paris, where Louis XIV himself commended the subject to Philippe Quinault
and Jean-Baptiste Lully (1682).53 The absence of an authoritative original may have

51 On Euripides’ Andromeda and Aristophanes’ parody, see T. B. L. Webster (1967) 192–9; Rau
(1967) 65–89; Bubel, ed. (1991); Klimek-Winter (1993) 55–315; Van Looy (1998) 8: 147–90;
Austin and Olson, eds. (2004) lxii–lxiii; Karanika (2008).
52 Rapin (1694 [1674]) 115–16.
53 On these operas, see Rosand (1991) 67–75; Greer (1991) 31–76; Stein (1993); and Buford
Norman (2001) 237–58.
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178 What Was Tragedy?

been a recommendation to poets because it forestalled all direct comparisons. After

the controversy between Ancients and Moderns that erupted over their revision
of an extant text, Alceste (1674), Quinault, Lully, and Lully’s occasional librettist
Thomas Corneille confined themselves to lost Euripidean tragedies in Thésée (1675),
Bellérophon (1678), Pérsée (1682), and Phaéton (1683).
Of Euripides’ surviving tragedies, ten entered the operatic repertoire before the
close of the eighteenth century, sometimes with significant revisions to their plots:
Alcestis, Andromache, Electra, Hecuba, Helen, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphi-
genia among the Taurians, Medea, and Orestes.54 Although operas based on Euripi-
dean tragedies by no means dominated the repertoire, they tended to make their
entrance, or receive their most famous treatment, at times when composers wanted
to set their mark on opera or to reform it. We have already seen that Andromeda
brought opera to many of the cultural centers of Europe. When Quinault and
Lully wished to demonstrate the classical affiliations of their new genre tragédie en
musique, they produced Alceste (1674).55 The controversy provoked by that work
may have given Quinault and Lully pause, but when Thomas Corneille and Marc-
Antoine Charpentier were allowed to try their hand at tragédie en musique after the
death of Lully, they produced Médée (1693). And when Rameau made his belated
debut in the form, he wrote Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), a work so ambitious that his
contemporary André Campra (composer of the very successful Iphigénie en Tau-
ride, 1711) remarked that it contained enough music for ten operas.56
By the late seventeenth century, poets rarely approached Euripides directly,
­innocent of neoclassical adaptations of his plays. If French poets found their way
to Parnassus by following in the footsteps of Euripides, as the abbé d’Aubignac
claimed, most librettists were directed to his trail by Racine. When Apostolo Zeno,
one of the leaders of the Arcadian reform of opera, wrote an aria-heavy version of
Ifigenia in Aulide that was set to music at least eight times between 1718 and 1786,
he used Racine’s Iphigénie (1674) as his immediate source. When even the opera
seria of Zeno, Gravina, and Metastasio seemed in need of reform, Francesco Alga-
rotti wrote his own version of the play (at the same time that Denis Diderot was
urging its musical potential) in order to demonstrate the theoretical principles that
he had outlined in his Essay on Opera (1755). This treatise found a receptive audi-
ence in Parma, where the minister Guillaume Léon du Tillot was undertaking his
own theatrical reforms. Although he declined to produce Algarotti’s libretto, Du
Tillot invited the luminary to Parma to offer advice on the production of Ippolito
ed Aricia (1759), an attempt to marry the best of Euripides, Racine, and the abbé
Pellegrin (who furnished Rameau’s livret on the same subject), with the tradition
of Neapolitan aria opera represented by the young Tommaso Traetta. The opera
made its way to the court of Mannheim, another center of reform, within months.57

54 Zinar (1971).
55 On the controversy over Alceste, see Buford Norman (2001); and Brooks, Norman, and Zarucchi,
eds. (1994).
56 Dill (1998) 53.
57 “Troisième entretien sur le Fils naturel ” (1757) in Diderot (1980) 10: 139–62. See Tiersot
(1930); Heartz (2004) 257–70.
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Operatic Discoveries 179

Meanwhile, working in Vienna with the likes of the poet Calzabigi and the
choreographers Gasparo Angiolini and Jean-George Noverre, the composers Traetta
and Gluck produced the century’s most influential reform operas.58 The first
full-length production was Traetta’s Ifigenia in Tauride (1763); the most famous
was Gluck’s Alceste (1767), which we considered in the last chapter. Gluck showed
Parisian audiences how their own tradition might be renewed by the spirit of
­reform in Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), Alceste (1776), and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779),
a work that Niccolò Piccini recast in his own style (1781), thus precipitating the
“Querelle” between the Gluckists and the Piccinistes. Even Luigi Cherubini chose
Iphigénie en Aulide (1788) as the subject of his most distinguished opera seria and
Médée as the subject of one of his most successful tragédies en musique (1797).
Euripides was by no means the only author to whom librettists turned when
they wanted to make a statement. Trissino’s Sofonisba (1515), honored as the first
regular tragedy of the Renaissance, and Alessandro Striggio’s Orfeo (1608), remem-
bered as the first great opera, also possessed the kind of cultural capital to attract
ambitious reformers—and were in fact revised by the likes of Traetta and Gluck.
But even such a cursory survey of the operatic repertoire should suffice to show
that when early moderns looked at the cross roads of tragedy and early modern
opera, they saw Euripides standing there—and by his side his most successful
modern interpreter, Racine.

T H E E U R I P I D E A N T R A G E D Y O F A N T I C I PAT E D WO E

The Euripidean tragedies that entered the operatic repertoire before 1800 reveal
that librettists and composers were attracted to a subset of plays that constitute a
strong reading not only of the Euripidean tradition but of tragic catharsis. This
becomes especially apparent if we give due weight to the three plays—Iphigenia in
Aulis, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Alcestis—that librettists felt free to present
without revising the plot drastically.
In what sense can these operas be said to provide a tragic catharsis? Euripides
himself leaves some hints. In Medea, for example, the Nurse regrets that “no one
has discovered how to put an end to mortals’ bitter griefs with music and song
sung to the lyre. It is because of these griefs that deaths and terrible disasters over-
throw houses. It would have been a gain for mortals to cure these ills by song”
(ll. 195–201). We are surely meant to think that the Athenians have met this need
with their tragedies. But in what sense, precisely, can tragedy be said to cure ills by
song? René Girard and Walter Burkert, whose views on the subject have been par-
ticularly influential in recent decades, argue that tragic representations function
like blood sacrifices.59 The action of several of Euripides’ plays, including the
Hecuba, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Iphigenia in Aulis, threatens to result in,
58 For some of their theoretical statements, which are filled with appeals to the example of ancient
tragedy and pantomime, see [Calzabigi] (1756), Noverre (1760), Angiolini (1765), and Gluck,
“Dedication” for Alceste (1769) in Allanbrook, ed. (1998) 198–200.
59 Burkert (1983); Girard (1977).
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180 What Was Tragedy?

or is actually consummated by, a human sacrifice, and the Bacchae, a tragedy that
is conspicuous by its absence from the operatic repertoire before the twentieth cen-
tury, can easily be read as an admission of the deep-seated connection between
tragic joy and the sense of emotional liberation afforded by communal violence
against a victim.60 This, more often than not, was the cathartic experience that
twentieth-century composers sought when they returned to ancient tragedies.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss’ Elektra (Dresden, 1909) ends, for
example, with Elektra dancing herself to death in a frenzy of triumph as she urges
her brother Orestes to strike their mother dead.61 And numerous operatic versions
of the Bacchae in the twentieth century—from Egon Wellesz’s (1931) to Daniel Börtz
and Igmar Bergman’s (Stockholm, 1991)—are engrossed in, rather than embar-
rassed by, the play’s concluding frenzy of destruction, which seems to bear witness
to the deep complicity of the sacred in the violent and of tragedy in both.
This is not what early modern dramatists value in Euripides. We will come
closer to their point of view if we return to the deliberations of the Florentine
Alterati, an informal academy that was founded in 1569 and that met once or
twice a week at the palace of Giovan Battista Strozzi the Younger to discuss subjects
such as Aristotle’s Poetics, Francesco Patrizi’s new commentary on the Poetics, the
verse forms appropriate to tragedy, how rhetoric and poetry moved the passions,
and what tragic catharsis meant. Its members included Giovanni Bardi, the patron
of the Florentine Camerata; Ottavio Rinuccini, the librettist of Dafne (1597),
Euridice (1600), and Arianna (1608); Jacopo Corsi, who contributed music to Peri
and Rinuccini’s Dafne and sponsored their Euridice; Prince Giovanni de’ Medici,
who staged Caccini’s 1600 The Rape of Cefalus (Rapimento de Cefalo); Girolomo
Mei, the leading authority on ancient music in the Renaissance; and Giovanni
Batttista Doni, author of several works on ancient and modern music, including A
Treatise on Theatrical Music (Trattato della musica scenica, rev. 1640).62
In chapter 2, we took notice of the discourse on tragic purgation that Lorenzo
Giacomini delivered to the academy in 1586.63 Giacomini was not a professional
scholar but a distinguished amateur who wrote an Italian translation of the Poetics
(1573) whose clarity and concision wins praise to this day;64 who (with his secre-
tary Giorgio Bartoli) took a lively interest in the revival of tragedy and the perfec-
tion of the stile rappresentativo; and who, thanks to his independent-minded
discourses on topics ranging from the dignity of arts and letters to the natural
causes of the “divine” fury that Plato ascribes to the poet, achieved prominence in
Florence as a literary critic. At the end of his discourse, after he has made his case
for a medical interpretation of catharsis as purgation, Giacomini singles out Iphi-
genia among the Taurians for discussion, a telling choice that to my knowledge has
escaped comment among opera historians. Tragedies that proceed from misery to

60 For an exhaustive overview of the theme of human sacrifice in western tragedy and opera, see
Hughes (2007).
61 See Goldhill (2002) 108–77.    62 Palisca (1968).
63 Giacomini (1972 [1586]). Hathaway (1962) 251–60 discusses the discourse in the context of
rival explanations of catharsis, while Palisca (1968) 24–9 discusses its musical significance.
64 Weinberg (1961) 523–9.
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Operatic Discoveries 181

felicity can be purgative, says Giacomini, because the prospect of an impending

evil can move us as powerfully as a present one. Thus, when Iphigenia prepares to
sacrifice her unrecognized brother Orestes in her role as a priestess in Tauris, she
elicits almost as much pity as she would if she actually killed him. For “the laying
out of the instruments of a miserable death that is impending” can move our com-
passion as much as the sight of an actual death, which might “appear so terrible,
occasioning such a painful withdrawal of the vital spirits to the heart,” that it
would make pity and tears impossible, inducing “a stupor and that numbness of
which Dante speaks: ‘I did not weep, I so turned to stone inside.’ ”65
For Giacomini, Iphigenia among the Taurians is an example of what Aristotle
meant by the best manner of tragic fable. He can justify his choice because the
Poetics says that Euripides is not to be faulted for focusing on heroes like Orestes
who “have happened either to undergo or to do fearful things.” In fact, “the artis-
tically finest kind of tragedy . . . is based upon this structure” and “in our theaters
and competitions such plays appeal to the audience as most tragic, if they follow
the right principle, and Euripides, even though in other respects his construction
is faulty, nevertheless appeals to the audience as the most tragic, at least, of the
poets” (Poetics 1453a21–31; trans. Else). To be sure, some renaissance commenta-
tors think that Aristotle’s purpose in this passage is simply to defend Euripides’ use
of unhappy endings.66 But Giacomini knows that Aristotle also says that tragedies
like Iphigenia among the Taurians and the lost Cresphontes, in which recognition
averts a violent deed, are the “best” kind (kratiston).67 Striving to understand how
Iphigenia among the Taurians can be the “best” (ottima) manner of tragic fable,
Giacomini concludes that the tragedian’s essential duty is to move audiences to
extremes of pity and fear without letting them fall into a petrifaction of horror. If
that purpose can be accomplished by a plot that moves from misery to felicity, then
the success justifies the endeavor. Although Giacomini quotes Dante to describe
the stupefaction that might result if Orestes were actually killed in Iphigenia among
the Taurians, the words also suggest the potency of a drama based on imagined
evils. For what turns Ugolino to stone is not the sight of a death but a premonition
based on a dream: As he beholds his innocent sons in the tower, he foresees their
deaths by starvation and his own feast on their flesh.
In their late masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride (Paris, 1779), Guillard and Gluck
demonstrate that they fully understand the power of a woe that is anticipated or
recollected to seize the imagination of a character and to sway the passions of the
audience.68 In the opening scene, Iphigénie confides that, although the storm that
has been raging on stage up till now has suddenly calmed down, it continues to rage
in her heart. For she has been troubled by a dream in which she found herself once
65 Giacomini (1972 [1586]) 370–1.
66 Castelvetro (1978–79 [1570, 1576]) 1: 376. Several modern classicists have rejected the notion
that Aristotle means only to praise Euripides’ unhappy endings; see, for example, Aristotle (1958)
25–6 n. 4; and Else (1967) 400–6.
67 Aristotle, Poetics 1454a2–9. For an attempt to reconcile The Poetics’ seemingly contradictory
praise for Oedipus the Tyrant and Iphigenia among the Taurians, see Stephen A. White (1992).
68 On earlier French adaptations of the tragedy, see Pascal, ed. (1997); and Brillaud (2010a)
109–36.
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182 What Was Tragedy?

again in the palace of her father Agamemnon. At the thought of enjoying his em-
brace, she forgot about his attempt to sacrifice her at Aulis and even put her years of
subsequent misery in Tauris out of her mind; then the earth trembled, the sky
turned black, fire glowed in the air, and lightning struck the palace, consuming it.
From amid the ruins, she heard a tender voice (suggested by a flute and oboe in the
accompaniment). As she ran toward these sad sounds, her father appeared, wounded
and fleeing her mother. Then her mother Clytemnestre armed her with a sword. As
Iphigénie was prepared to flee, she heard a cry, “Stop, it is Orestes.” Although she
wanted to help the boy, a higher power forced her arm to pierce his breast. The
dreadful quality of the dream is not lost on the chorus, who exclaim,

O dreadful dream! Fearful night! Ô songe affreux! nuit effroyable!

O grief! O mortal terror! Ô douleur! ô mortel effroi!
When the Scythian king Thoas appears, worried by the cries and lamentations that
he hears emanating from the Temple of Diane, he reveals that he too is haunted by
imagined threats, which seem to grow in intensity and power as his voice ascends
and the orchestra marches forward:

My frightened soul is ceaselessly obsessed De noirs presentiments, mon âme intimidée,

with black forebodings, with sinister terrors. De sinistres terreurs est sans cesse obsédée.
The first act, in short, is an essay in the dramaturgy of anticipation.
Yet Act 2 continues to work the same vein. It opens with the imprisoned Oreste
wondering what horrors the gods have in store for him, and it ends with Iphigénie
lamenting his death proleptically:
Oh heaven, cause and witness of my Ô ciel! de mes tourments la cause et le
torments, témoin,
rejoice in the misery to which you have Jouissez du malheur où vous m'avez réduite;
reduced me:
it could go no further! Ils ne pouvaient aller plus loin!
As the chorus of priestesses lament the loss of their homeland in G minor, Iphigénie
collects—and prepares to reflect upon—her grief. Her G major air with chorus,
“Ô malheureuse Iphigénie” is a kommos, or song of lament, that is all the more
affecting for its approach to a lullaby. For Iphigénie is mourning the loss of her own
childhood, of her father, and of a brother whom she last saw when he was a child.
Her voice follows a melodic line that is first charted by an oboe, then supported, for
the most part, by simple harmonies, except when she enjoins the chorus, “Join your
plaintive cries to my groans! [Mêlez vos cris plaintifs à mes gémissements!].” The
spontaneous grief of this air and chorus are then contained and ceremonialized
by the pomp of the act’s closing air and chorus—a funeral ceremony in absentia. In
another play, the celebration of a funeral for a character who is still living could be
high comedy, but there is nothing risible about Iphigénie’s solemn grief: Gluck has
complete faith in the ability of an imaginary woe to elicit a response of mourning.
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Operatic Discoveries 183

This dramaturgy of anticipation recedes in Act 3 when Oreste and Pylade each
vie to die in place of the other—a scene that early modern dramatists from Gio-
vanni di Bernardo Rucellai (1525) to Guymond de la Touche (1757), an inter-
mediate source of Guillard’s livret, invariably dilate. But it returns in Act 4 as
Iphigénie considers the prospect of sacrificing this young Greek for whom she
feels such a mysterious tenderness. Although he reassures her that she is only
bringing his long suffering to a conclusion, Oreste finds that the girl’s tears and
sighs soothe his torments. For no one has shed tears for his misfortunes “since the
fatal moment, alas! long ago [depuis l’instant fatal, hélas! depuis longtemps].”
Oreste is decked with garlands like a sacrificial victim, purified with libations, and
led to the altar. As Iphigénie is enjoined to strike, her unrecognized brother sighs,
“Iphigenia, lovable sister, thus also on another day did you perish in Aulis [Iphi-
génie, aimable sœur! C’est ainsi qu’autrefois tu péris en Aulide].” This aside,
which is based on Aristotle’s account of the way Polyidos handled the mutual
recognition of the siblings (Poetics 1455b2–12), produces a joyful response that is
(wilfully) unalloyed by the thought of horrors past: “Ah!” says Iphigénie when her
brother expresses doubt that she can love him, “Let us put aside that baneful
memory [Ah! Laissons-là ce souvenir funeste].” For a time, it appears that this
recognition may not, in fact, produce a reversal of fortune, for Thoas intrudes,
demanding that the sacrifice be performed and then deciding, when he learns that
his priestess and victim are brother and sister, that he should sacrifice both with
his own hands. But Pylade arrives with a band of Greeks in time to kill Thoas, and
Diane descends from a machine to impose order. The Scythians must return her
statues to the Greeks, and Oreste shall no longer hear the plaintive cries of his
mother’s shade, for “Your tears have washed clean your crimes [Tes pleurs ont lavé
tes forfaits].”
Iphigénie en Tauride advances a theory of tragic catharsis that is no less sophisti-
cated than Giacomini’s, even if it remains implicit. The Scythians interpret cath-
arsis as a form of purgation by sacrifice, a ritual bloodbath that can appease the
gods and cleanse their realm. They could be said to accept the definition of cath-
arsis provided in the first humanist Greek lexicon, Guillaume Bude’s 1529 Com-
mentaries on the Greek Language (Commentarii linguae Graecae). They assume that
catharsis is a cleansing (purgatio) and a purification by sacrifice (lustratio). “Ah! It is
not tears but blood that [heaven] demands [ce n’est pas des pleurs, c’est du sang
qu’il demande],” says Thoas in response to the opening storm. When the Scythians
discover Oreste and Pylade, they declare with joy:

The gods themselves have delivered us the Les dieux nous ont eux-mêmes amené les
victims; victimes;
Let our recognition equal their bounty! Que la reconnaissance égale les bienfaits!
Let their blood gush out beneath the Sous le couteau sacré que leur sang
sacred knife rejaillisse!
in order that their impure presence Que leur aspect impur n’infecte plus ces
infect this region no more! lieux!
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184 What Was Tragedy?

French audiences may not have sat secure in the knowledge that such violent lusts
were alien to their own culture. It has been suggested that La Touche’s portrayal of
Thoas in 1757 bore more than a passing resemblance to the fearful Louis XV, who
had had one of his servants viciously tortured in public for attempting his life, and
to the Jesuits, whom La Touche portrayed (after leaving the order) as a backward
cult committed to human sacrifice.69 To be sure, the chorus of priestesses take a
more ambivalent view of sacrifice than the Scythians do, speaking of it as a tragic
necessity, an action that must be performed and regretted at the same time. Yet
they remain convinced that blood and tears alike must be offered to appease the
justice of the gods (4.2); they are even inclined to think that the slaughter of the
Taurians might be a lustration pleasing to Diane. In the end, however, it is the tears
of the Greeks alone that effect catharsis: the efficacy of religious sacrifice yields to
that of aesthetic response, and pity is ultimately affirmed as the most ­estimable of
the tragic passions. This is a conclusion that seems remarkably consistent with the
promise of Tragedy in the prologue of Euridice (1600) to sing “not of blood spilled
from innocent veins, not of the lifeless brow of a tyrant,” but “of mournful and
tearful scenes”—a promise that has been too often interpreted as a retreat from
tragedy to tragicomedy.70
Contemporary accounts of the reception of Iphigénie en Tauride attest that audi-
ences shared openly in those tears, affirming in public their own honesty, sensibility,
and moral habitus.71 Hector Berlioz’s experience is just one of the more famous
tributes to its power: “Short of fainting, I could not have had a greater experience
when I saw Gluck’s masterpiece Iphigenia . . . . I defy the hardest-hearted being to
stay unmoved at the sight of these two wretches longing for death as their greatest
hope.”72 But Iphigénie en Tauride is not content to arouse strong passions; it also
instructs the audience when fear and pity are appropriate. The unsympathetic
Thoas feels an elemental fear of death. The more admirable Iphigénie, Oreste, and
Pylade, on the other hand, all long for death at one time or another: They fear to
be the authors of unnatural acts against kin and loved ones. And whereas Thoas
wishes to sacrifice victims in order to avoid the punishment of the gods, Oreste
names the gods the “authors of my crimes [auteurs de mes crimes],” yet, at the
same time, sublimely calls upon them to strike him down in order to vindicate
themselves. We shall see in the next chapter that Jesuit playwrights were capable of
exploring such a paradox in the sixteenth century, but the more proximate source
of Oreste’s noble yearning for justice, even at the cost of his own life, may be
Racine’s Phèdre, who sentences herself to death, regardless of her personal respon-
sibility for her crimes, to purge the universe of their taint: “And death, depriving
my eyes of light, restores to the day, which they sully, all its purity [Et la Mort à mes
yeux dérobant la clarté / Rend au jour, qu’ils souillant, toute sa pureté]” (ll. 1643–4).
In Gluck, strong passions such as these, which are aroused by, rather than heedless
of, a sense of ethics, are characteristic of a civilized people.
69 Hughes (2007) 108–10; Hall (2013) 197–9.    70 Hanning (1973) 245–6, 252.
71 On weeping in French theaters during this period, see Vincent-Buffault (1991) 54–76; James H.
Johnson (1995); and Goldhill (2011) 97–9.
72 Berlioz (1966) 11.
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Operatic Discoveries 185

Palisca describes Giacomini’s discourse on tragic purgation—which could still

serve as a guide to Gluck’s procedures two centuries later—as “a document of the
prevailing taste.” He suggests that this taste supported the strange compound of
dramatic ingredients that found their way into “the Roman and Venetian operas
of the seventeenth century.” It was a taste, he says, that “demanded of the stage
not true tragedy but a mixed genre that adds to the emotionally purgative experi-
ence a feast of the senses and the mind.”73 But this formulation obscures the import-
ance of Euripides as the classical model for the very genre that Palisca identifies.
H. D. F. Kitto puts it in these terms: By “reducing the tragic to the pathetic” in
plays like Alcestis, Electra, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Iphigenia in Aulis,
Euripides “made it possible to combine harmoniously into one theatrical whole a
wide range of emotional effects.”74 We need not stress the appeal of that “theatrical
whole” to opera composers: They produced eighteen versions of Iphigenia among
the Taurians and seventeen versions of Iphigenia in Aulis before 1800. What we do
need to question is Kitto’s easy distinction between the tragic and the pathetic.
For many nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics, plays like Alcestis, Electra,
Orestes, and Iphigenia among the Taurians are by definition untragic because they
offer an “earthly resolution of the tragic dissonance.”75 Yet we know from Euripides’
texts that he was interested in developing an “art against grief,” and at least one
classicist has gone so far as to anoint him the originator of catharsis as a tragic ideal,
the practicing dramatist who showed Aristotle the way.76 Rather than assuming
that his plays do not offer a truly cathartic experience, we would do better to think
of them as a series of experimental but internally coherent answers to the question,
What sorts of song cure ills?
Although Euripides shows a consistent taste for scenes of extreme pathos and is
inclined to elicit pity by staging or describing the suffering or death of helpless
victims like young virgins and children, he does not adhere to a particular tragic
pattern, and he seems to have been willing to entertain the possibility that, as
Giacomini said, an action that moves from misery to felicity might still be purga-
tive because the soul contemplates an impending evil as if it were a present reality.
In most of the plays that Kitto labels “melodramas,” Euripides leads the psyches of
his audience by harrowing them with prospects of evil and exposing them to pas-
sions developed to the point of fulness before stupefying them with the marvelous
entrance of a god.77 His di ex machina are not just a way to tie up his plots, or to
pander to a taste for spectacle. They are a means, or so early modern readers could
reasonably interpret them, of completing the affective script of his tragedies by
stirring the audience to intense wonder—a passion that, according to many com-
mentators, had its own purgative qualities. They are, in other words, an integral
part of his art against grief.
This, at any rate, is the way many Italian operas and French tragédies en musique
interpret Euripidean tragedy. Their moments of deepest fear and pity often fall well

73 Palisca (1968) 28–9.    74 Kitto (1954) 336–7.

75 Nietzsche (1967) 10; Kitto (1954) 331.    76 See Diano (1961) and Pucci (1980).
77 On the history of describing Euripides’ plays as melodramas, see Michelini (1987) 321–33.
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186 What Was Tragedy?

before the catastrophe. Think of Le Cerf de la Viéville’s account of the audience’s

reaction to the end of Act 2 of Quinault and Lully’s Armide (1686), when they are
ravished by the mere specter of an impending evil: “When Armide nerves herself
to stab Renaud . . . I have twenty times seen the entire audience in the grip of fear,
neither breathing nor moving, their whole attention in their ears and eyes, until
the instrumental air which concludes the scene allowed them to draw breath again,
after which they exhaled with a murmur of pleasure and admiration.”78 If the pur-
pose of tragedy is simply to stir up and purge the passions, there is no reason why
it should not stage scenes like this, and there is every reason for it to introduce a
deus ex machina at the end to arouse a final sense of wonder. Such endings had become
so conventional by the eighteenth century that Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret
could explain that they fell within the rules of dramatic propriety because “a machine
nearly always ends serious operas in France, in imitation of Greek plays.”79
I do not believe, any more than Claude Palisca or Nino Pirrotta does, that seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century librettists were under the impression that their
productions were historically accurate reconstructions of ancient Greek tragedies.
Nor do I wish to deny that Latin literature or pastoral drama contributed to the
development of opera. The pioneers of opera read widely in classical sources from
a variety of genres and periods, consciously rejecting the use of masks when they
would interfere with the expression of the passions, drawing freely on accounts of
Alexandrian and Roman actors, dancers, and machinists, and always bearing in
mind that the first duty of the poet was to please his contemporary audience. A
mournful sense of the gulf dividing modern Europe from the ancient world, the
contemporary stage from the ancient theater, runs through some of the very writ-
ings in which they piece together the fragmentary evidence of the past. Indeed, it
could be argued that it was their very consciousness of belatedness that reinforced
their taste for Euripides and for the “decadent” performers of Alexandria and
Rome, who were themselves confronted with the task of renewing a revered, yet
increasingly alien, literary and dramatic tradition.
But when scholars dismiss the claims of early opera or tragédie en musique to
being true tragedy, they obscure both how open and contested were the generic
boundaries of tragedy in the early modern period and how avidly librettists fed
on a particular style of tragic dramaturgy. It is time we recognized that in imagina-
tively responding to Euripides’ musical dramaturgy, early opera helped to disentangle
his tragic style from Seneca’s sententious revision of it, and, by so doing, to secure
his position as the premier model of classical tragedy, spoken or sung, by the time
the abbé d’Aubignac announced that recent poets had “recovered the Way to Par-
nassus, upon the Footsteps of Euripides.”80 With its musical representation of the
passions, its episodic plotting, its choral interludes, and its felicitous catastrophes,
a major vein of early modern opera is a strong reading of a set of complex tragedies
with happy endings that were highly prized in Hellenistic Greece but that fell

78 Jean-Laurent Le Cerf de la Viéville, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique fran-

çoise, trans. in Wood and Sadler, eds. (2000) 39.
79 Nougaret (1769) 2: 211.    80 d’Aubignac (1684) 1: 12.
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Operatic Discoveries 187

from grace in the nineteenth century. Both the power of this style of musical
dramaturgy and its utter incompatibility with the post-Kantian philosophy of the
tragic are underlined by Mozart’s Idomeneo (Munich, 1780), my final example of
this tradition.

IDOMENEO AND THE TRAGEDY OF

AV E RT E D S A C R I F I C E

Mozart was twenty-four when he received the commission to compose Idomeneo

for Karl Theodor, who had recently moved his electoral court from Mannheim to
Munich, bringing with him much of his brilliant musical and theatrical establish-
ment. Three years before, during a journey with his mother, Mozart had arrived in
Mannheim to find the Elector Palatine presiding over one of the most cosmopol-
itan courts of Europe. If music was, in the words of Charles Burney, “the chief and
most constant of his electoral highness’s amusements,” theater ran a close second,
for he not only maintained a French theatrical troupe dedicated to productions of
classical drama, he also sponsored productions of Greek Revival, Shakespearean,
and contemporary Storm and Stress drama. In opera, the elector sought an ideal
union of music and drama. His orchestra was the finest that Leopold Mozart had
ever heard, and both his scenographer, Lorenzo Quaglio, and his stage director and
dancing master, Pierre Le Grand, enjoyed international reputations. The elector
favored operas on serious subjects in which the moral dilemmas of rule were
explored, the nobility of passive suffering acknowledged, and the artistic resources
of aria-based opera were blended with those of tragédie en musique, with its stress
on spectacular divertissements and grand choruses. He commissioned innovative
reform operas by Niccolò Jommelli, Tommaso Traetta, Johann Christian Bach,
and Ignaz Holzbauer.81
Mozart told the elector directly that it was his “dearest wish to write an opera”
in Mannheim, but the offer would not be extended until two and a half years later,
when the court had removed to Munich.82 In the interval, Mozart fell in love with
the voice and the person of the young soprano Aloisa Weber; traveled to Paris,
where he studied French classical tragedy and tragédies en musique, including
Gluck’s recent Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), Alceste (1776), and Iphigénie en Tauride
(1779); watched his mother die in Paris; and endured Aloisa’s painful rejection. By
the time Mozart received his commission, he had already written fifteen operas
(including the opera seria Lucio Silla and the opera buffa La finta giardiniera), but
these difficult years of study, disappointment, and grief made him a better judge of
drama and a more intensely dramatic composer.
By 1780, the operatic potential of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (405 bc) and
Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide (1674) had been demonstrated in Vienna, Rome,

81 Heartz (1990) 15–18; McClymonds (1994); and Cairns (2006) 32–6.

82 Mozart, Letter to his Father, 1777 in Mozart (1985) 362.
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188 What Was Tragedy?

Berlin, Paris, and other cultural capitals.83 The nearest Old Testament equivalent
to this myth, Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter, which had been dramatized as
early as the 1540s by George Buchanan in France and by the Jesuits at the College
of Messina, had also been recast to great applause as an oratorio, tragédie en musique,
and opera.84 The success of these works naturally encouraged a search for similar
fables, and that of Idomeneus, a king of Crete who appears in passing in the Aeneid,
was one of the least well known—and no wonder, for Servius, a fourth-century
commentator on Virgil, is our only authority for it. Modern accounts of the story
begin with François de Fénelon’s brilliant, didactic novel of 1699 The Adventures of
Telemechus, Son of Ulysses (Les aventures de Télémaque: fils d’Ulysse). When the
titular hero of the novel arrives on Crete, the inhabitants are in search of a new
king. He learns from Mentor that according to the laws of Crete, the king “can do
anything to the people; but the laws can do anything to him. He has an absolute
power in doing good, but his hands are tied from doing wrong.” The king must
behave himself like “the father of his subjects.” Idomeneus fell short of this standard
when his ships were caught in a terrible storm on his return from the Trojan War:
He vowed to sacrifice the first person he saw if he landed safely. When he disem-
barked, already ashamed of his vow, his son Idamante was the first to greet him.
Although Sophronius, the interpreter of the will of the gods, argued that the king
should be wary of compounding the folly of making such a vow with the guilt of
fulfilling it against the laws of nature, the son declared that he was content to die
to appease the gods, and at that instant, as if possessed by furies, Idomeneus plunged
his sword into the heart of his child. The father was “deprived of his reason by an
ecstasy of grief,” and the people, “touched with compassion for the son, and with
horror at the barbarous act of the father,” which could be considered the perfect
reversal of his solemn duty to behave like a father to his people, rose up in rebellion.
The friends of the king, sensing that there was no way to save him but by flight,
carried him to their ship and embarked again for the waves.85 This brief episode in
Telemachus furnished the fable for declaimed tragedies by Claude Prosper Jolyot de
Crébillon (1705) and Antoine-Marin Lemierre (1764), a tragédie en musique by
Antoine Danchet and André Campra (1712), and an opera by Baldassare Galuppi
(Rome, 1756).
Some scholars have suggested that Mozart himself might have presented the
court with the proposal to revise and reset Danchet’s livret.86 After all, Leopold
Mozart admired Fénelon enough to visit his grave in 1766, and his son began
reading Telemachus in 1770. We know that he spent his days reading old livrets in
1779 and that his friend Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, with whom he lodged in
Paris, had expressed the view that both Jephthah and Idomeneus were better suited

83 Heartz (1990) 1–13; Rushton and Neville (1993).

84 On Buchanan’s Jephthah, see Shuger (1994) ch. 4; and Nyquist (2008). Oratorios on the subject
were written by Giacomo Carissimi (Rome, 1650) and G. F. Handel (London, 1752); a tragedy with
sung choruses by Claude Boyer (Paris, 1692); and a tragédie en musique by Simon-Joseph Pellegrin and
Michel Pignolet Montéclair (Paris, 1732). For a general account of sacrificial subjects in the enlight-
enment theater, see Gliksohn (1985).
85 Fénelon (1994) 160–3.    86 Heartz (1978).
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Operatic Discoveries 189

to opera than to declaimed tragedy because they were “susceptible of interesting

spectacle and a great number of strong and pathetic situations that welcome
musical setting.”87 But we have no direct evidence that Mozart suggested the fable
to the elector’s court and every reason to assume that he, like other composers, was
presented with his subject. Indeed, the court had already turned to Fénelon’s novel
for its 1780 Carnival opera, Telemaco. It is more plausible to imagine Count Joseph
Anton von Seeau, the intendant of the theater, approaching Leopold Mozart with
a tentative proposal that was ironed out in consultation with the composer and
the abbé Giambattista Varesco, a Jesuit-trained poet who was, like Mozart, in the
employ of the archiepiscopal court in Salzburg. These discussions resulted in a
detailed “plan” that would have included a list of scenes, the placement and char-
acter of musical numbers, and even details about orchestration, all of which would
have been submitted for approval to the orchestra director, the dancing master, the
set designer, and even the principle singers.88 Idomeneo is eloquent testimony that
design, rather than organic development, can produce great art.
Yet the unusually rich correspondence recording the genesis of Idomeneo also
underlines the fact that the process of design entailed collaboration, experiment,
rehearsal, and refinement. Mozart arrived in Munich with about a third of his score
in hand. As he rehearsed the singers and conferred with Quaglio and Le Grand, he
requested numerous revisions to the libretto. Was it decorous for a king to be alone
on a ship? Wasn’t an aside out of place in an aria? In some cases, the changes were
reluctant concessions to reality: The inexperienced castrato Vincenzo dal Prato and
the aging tenor Anton Raaf, whom Metastasio had once called a “block of ice,” were
simply incapable of performing the recognition scene of father and son with the
pathetic simplicity that Mozart and Varesco had envisioned. Other changes were
made to take advantage of theatrical effects that Varesco and Mozart had never con-
sidered: Once Le Grand explained his ideas for having the chorus react to news of
the victim’s identity with bold stage movements, Mozart concluded that “there will
be so much noise and confusion on the stage that an aria at this particular point
would cut a poor figure.” He therefore decided to rely exclusively on recitative, but
he did so with enthusiasm, for he could imagine the sensation that the scene would
make.89 The result of this artistic collaboration is an opera that embodies the nob-
lest ideal of tragedy contemplated by the early modern poetics of tragedy while
frustrating the expectations of our modern philosophy of the tragic.
Idomeneo commences with a tone of majesty, authority, and confidence that is
created by the upbeats of a French overture style, the use of brass and tympani, a
march-like rhythm, and a melody that never deviates from the D major scale.90 Yet

87 March 1, 1764 in Grimm (1829–31) 5: 462.    88 Sadie (2006) 524–5.

89 For these changes, see Mozart to his Father, Munich, November 13, 1780; Munich, November
8, 1780; Munich, November 15, 1780 in Mozart (1985) 663, 659, 664.
90 For a modern edition of the score, see the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, ed. Daniel Heartz (New York:
Bärenreiter, 1973). This attempts to present Mozart’s final decisions of 1781 and his 1786 version as
alternatives; Heartz did not, however, have access to some autograph materials that have since come
to light. For details, see Rushton, ed. (1993) 2–3. My understanding of the score has been informed
especially by Dent (1947) 33–66; Heartz (1990) 37–63; Rushton, ed. (1993); and Cairns (2006)
32–68.
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190 What Was Tragedy?

this regal entrance is immediately menaced by a low growl from the strings, which,
rising to a forte, play a winding figure with chromatic pitches. If the first theme
suggests regal authority, the second warns of some natural or supernatural threat to
it. A third motive—a long note followed by a swift descent in the woodwinds—
will become associated with Idamante, the hapless victim of the king’s collision
with Neptune. After slipping into G minor, the music reaffirms the commanding
mood of its opening, then makes an idyllic digression before drawing to a close,
with the woodwinds crying out in a descending line. The overture transports us
from triumph to pathetic solitude, for as it terminates with a languishing, chro-
matic sigh, it plunges us, as do so many Euripidean tragedies, into the subjectivity
of a hapless young woman, hard pressed by love and war.
The Trojan princess Ilia appears alone, standing in a gallery of the royal palace
of Crete, ready to complete the musical movement to G minor, Mozart’s favorite
key of pathos. The next seven scenes unfold in one great dramatic movement that
depends for its sense of oneness on the abiding image of a storm at sea and for
its dramatic development on the changing significance of that image. It is by
turns a shadowy type of the Trojan War, a reminder of the vulnerability of humans
to the forces of nature and the hostility of the gods, and an externalization of
the soul’s passive suffering. In the first lines of her monologue, Ilia presents her-
self as the wretched remnant of a cruel tempest—both the war and the storm
that would have taken her own life had not Idamante pulled her from the waves.
She shifts easily between simple and accompanied recitative before singing a
binary aria in G minor filled with ambivalence and pain: She is a captive bru-
talized by war, grief-stricken by the death of her father Priam and her many
brothers, and duty-bound to seek their revenge; and yet she feels a dawning love
for Idamante. The verse accords an equal weight to the claims of vengeance and
gratitude, but the music suggests what Ilia herself has not yet cognized: that love
will prevail.
Like many heroines of the early modern stage, Ilia insists that the passive suffering
of a soul beset by passions is as terrible as physical torture: Vengeance, jealousy,
hate, and love are pitiless executioners whose malevolence is expressed by the
music’s syncopation, swift scales, and dotted rhythms. Idamante’s gallant profes-
sion of love and magnanimous release of the Trojan prisoners must be balm to Ilia’s
heart, but the intrusion of the councilor Arbace, who announces that Idomeneo
and his men have just been lost at sea, cuts short the rejoicing and leaves Elettra
alone on stage to express her jealous fear that, once he is his own master, Idamante
will elevate her rival to the throne.
Some critics question why Elettra should be in the opera at all because she never
performs any deeds.91 But in her person and her tortured mind, she bears witness
to all the trauma of the Trojan War. She reminds us that at the instigation of the
priest Calchas, Agamemnon sacrificed her sister Iphigenia so that the Greek fleet
might sail from Aulis to Troy; that when her father returned home to Argos with
Cassandra as his captive and concubine, her mother Clytemnestra cut him down

91 See, for example, Sadie (2006) 544.

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Operatic Discoveries 191

in his bath; that she and her brother Orestes in turn slew their own mother in
­revenge; and that, as a consequence, they are both haunted by Furies. Elettra
belongs in Idomeneo because she embodies the cycle of violence and revenge—often
undertaken in the name of the gods—that the opera finally ends. She furthermore
provides a moral and musical foil for Ilia, who also hears the blood of her kin
crying out for revenge but listens instead to another voice. The contrasting moral
psychology of Ilia and Elettra is an integral part of Idomeneo’s dramatic and musical
design. For Idomeneo is not an exercise in radical individuation but an imitation of
manners and passions that is meant to shape the moral habitus of the audience as
it makes judgments, feels deeply, and reflects upon its own passionate responses to
the action on stage.
Mozart develops the orchestral accompaniment to Elettra’s aria of jealous fury—
marked by a tremolando texture, vehement playing by the strings, and four
horns—into a symphonic description of a storm at sea as the scene changes to a
rocky shore. A double chorus of drowning sailors and horrified onlookers implores
the gods to have pity. At the reprise, Neptune appears above the waves, the sea
grows calm, Idomeneo implores mercy, and Neptune turns a menacing glance on
him as he disappears beneath the waves. Having dismissed his surviving followers,
Idomeneo contrasts the calm sea with the turmoil within (“Tranquillo è il mar”):
His vow was insane, atrocious.
Idomeneo’s tragedy of anticipated woe commences with the king’s first aria, in
which he imagines the ghost of his innocent victim haunting his conscience:

I shall see by my side Vedrommi intorno

the sorrowing shade l’ombra dolente
which night and day che notte e giorno
“I am innocent” “Sono innocente”
will call to me. m’accenerà.
In his pierced breast Nel sen trafitto
in his bloodless corpse nel corpo esangue
the shed blood il mio diletto
will point to lo sparso sangue
my crime. m’additerà.
What fear, what grief! Qual spavento, qual dolore!
How many times this heart Di tormento questo core
will die of torment! quante volte morirà!

Sung in C major, this aria is filled with simple pathos. As the king imagines his
victim’s protestation of innocence, he explores the tonic minor. In the third stanza
(allegro di molto), the king experiences a more energetic spasm of grief before set-
tling on a cadence that coincides with the appearance of his victim in person. At
the thought of what is to follow, he denounces his loathsome hands, the barbarous
and unjust gods, and wicked altars.
In Danchet’s livret, Idomeneo is slow to recognize that the kindly stranger who
has offered him aid is none other than his son Idamante. Varesco initially trans-
lated this scene faithfully from the French, as the plan indicated, and Mozart in
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192 What Was Tragedy?

fact suggested that it might be protracted in order to achieve an even greater effect.
But from Munich he sent a request that it be drastically cut. His letter occasioned
an emergency summit between his father Leopold and Varesco. They remained
convinced of the justice of every line, and Leopold sternly reminded his son that
this was a tragedy, not comedia dell’arte: “Do you want to make father and son run
up and recognize one another just as Harlequin and Brighella, who are disguised
as servants in a foreign country meet, recognized, and embrace each other imme-
diately? Remember that this is one of the finest scenes in the whole opera, nay, the
principle one, on which the entire remaining story depends. Further, this scene
cannot weary the audience, as it is in the first act.”92 Mozart replied that he had
suggested the cuts with regret only because Raaf and dal Prato were “the most
wretched actors that ever walked on stage.” However much Raaf and dal Prato may
have spoiled the recitative by “singing it without any spirit or fire,” the scene is
gripping and touching when performed by gifted actors. Idamante explains that he
has come readily to the assistance of a stranger because he has learned from his own
woes to be responsive to others’. With a guilty conscience, Idomeneo wonders if
the stranger could realize just how unfortunate he is? But Idamante, who has not
been thinking of himself at all but of his father, explains that Idomeneo, the dearest
object of his love, is lost at sea. What can Idomeneo mean to this stranger?, won-
ders the father. Then recognition and reversal coincide. The son, who has been
dejected to think his father dead, is overcome with joy and tries to embrace the
father. The father, who dreads the prospect of sacrificing his son, flees—a response
that seems so unpaternal that his heir is frozen with horror. Varesco charts the flux
and reflux of the four cardinal passions—joy, grief, desire, and loathing—in the
boldest terms, as if the spiritual states of his dramatis personae could be recorded
using a Cartesian grid that would measure their elation, their dejection, their
attraction, their repulsion.
As the act draws to a close, the Cretan warriors disembark on a calm sea, and the
women of the Cretan chorus sing and dance in honor of Neptune. Their divertisse-
ment starkly underlines the isolation of Idomeneo and the audience, who share the
same oppressive knowledge of his vow. Only the audience hears in the motives
associated with Idomeneo and Idamante a cause for grief. Such ironic divertissements
are one of the painful pleasures of tragédie en musique. They conclude Act 3 of
Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), when Theseus returns from Hades only to find
a hell at home; Act 1 of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulis (1774), when the chorus celebrate
the arrival of Iphigénie, thus dashing her father’s hope of averting her sacrifice; and
Act 1 of Gluck’s Alceste (1776), when the chorus rejoice at the return of their king
without realizing that he has been restored at the cost of their queen. In Idomeneo,
the ciaccona provides a cadence for the act, but it may also fill us with a grim fore-
boding, for in the tragic repertoire, the ciaccona, a dance associated with weddings
in happier circumstances, is all too often transfigured into a grim dance of death.

92 Mozart to his Father, Munich, November 8, 1780; Mozart to his Father, Munich, December 19,
1780; Leopold Mozart to his Son, Salzburg, December 22, 1780; Mozart to his Father, Munich,
­December 27, 1780 in Mozart (1985) 660, 693, with quotations at 695 and 698.
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Operatic Discoveries 193

In Act 2, Idomeneo confides his terrible secret to Arbace, who advises him to
send his son away from Crete and then sings an aria (which is often cut in modern
productions), expressing both his own identification with the king’s grief and the
sententious wisdom that those who aspire to be close to the throne should expect
to find suffering there. Critics puzzled by the prominence of the councilor’s role in
Idomeneo have concluded that Mozart needed to find employment for Domenico
de’ Panzacchi, who was a more talented actor than Raaf, but the tradition of sacri-
fice dramas running from George Buchanan’s Jephtha exercised its own influence:
When sovereigns make rash vows, they precipitate a crisis of church and state, and
it is essential that the king hear not only the demands of the priests but the advice
of his state counselors: Counselors are a feature of the genre.
When Ilia greets the king, her formal recitative breaks into an aria of astonishing
beauty sung in E flat major, “Se il padre perdei [Though I have lost my father, my
country, my repose, you are a father to me, and Crete is a sojourn full of love].” The
feeling behind her words seems to stay with Idomeneo when she leaves, for the
theme that we have just heard played by the wind instruments during her aria is
repeated by the strings during his recitative. He suddenly realizes that Neptune will
claim not one but three victims, stricken with equal pain (“da egual dolor afflitte”):
His son will die on the altar, and both he and Ilia will be pierced by sorrow. In a
surging aria that employs trumpets and drums for the first time in the act, Idome-
neo sings that although he has escaped the sea, he has a sea in his breast that is
more grievous. In his letters, Mozart reported that Raaf was as “infatuated” with
this aria “as a young and ardent lover might be with his fair one, for he sings it
at night before he goes to sleep and in the morning when he awakes.” “Fuor del
mare” is not the only aria in the opera to compare the perturbations of strong
feeling to a turbulent sea, nor is it the only one to insist that spiritual pain is as
significant, and as worthy of pity, as physical hardship and death, but it makes
these claims with particular clarity and force while affirming the essential moral
dignity of what Alexander Pope described as “a brave man struggling in the storms
of fate.”93
Acting on the advice of Arbace, Idomeneo decides to remove Idamante from
danger by sending him on a mission to return Elettra to Argos. Elettra hopes that
she may be able to win the affection of Idamante on their voyage, and the chorus
are cheered by the gentle aspect of the sea (“Placido è il mar, andiamo”), but Ida-
mante can think of nothing but his separation from Ilia and his father. In a trio
sung by Idomeneo, Idamante, and Elettra, father and son converge on similar
feelings of pain and regret, though for different reasons. Before the embassy can
embark, however, the waters swell, thunder erupts, lightning flashes, and a mon-
ster emerges from the sea. Mozart declared this to be the most exciting scene of
the opera because of its effective use of stage spectacle and tumultuous stage
movements. Amid his musical representation of a storm, the people cry out three
times demanding to know who is responsible for heaven’s wrath. The harmony

93 See Alexander Pope’s prologue to Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), l. 21.

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194 What Was Tragedy?

grinds downwards, pausing each time on a diminished seventh.94 As the king

finds his voice, the key is wrenched back to D major, “Behold in me, barbarous
god, the culprit! [Eccoti in me, barbaro Nume, il reo!].” Vasesco had originally
written an aria for this section, but Mozart judged that, given the noise and con-
fusion on stage, recitative would be more effective.95 The king declares that the
gods must accept his life; if they will not, they are unjust. As the storm rages on,
the chorus—terrified both by the violence of the storm and by the impiety of
their king—flies in confusion, singing “Let us run, let us flee [Corriamo, fug-
giamo].” As the libretto explains, the song and pantomime of the chorus “express
all of their terror, all of which forms an analogous action, and closes the act as the
only divertissement.”
If the first two acts are faithful to Danchet’s livret, most of the revisions to the
third, including a crowd scene before the palace, a priestly monologue, a chorus of
lamentation, a temple scene with a march, an expiatory chorus of priests, a scene
of reconciliation, a sacrificial substitution, and an oracular pronouncement can
be traced, as Daniel Heartz has demonstrated, to Gluck’s Alceste.96 Wounded by
the apparent disapproval of his father and the reserve of Ilia (who has concealed her
feelings for the prince from a sense of duty to her people), Idamante declares his
intention to do combat with the sea monster. Ilia’s instinctive concern betrays her
secret, but the two have barely had a chance to sing a love duet when Idomeneo
and Elettra intrude. As Idamante demands to know how he has offended and
­Idomeneo evades his questions, Ilia insists on being Idamante’s companion in
sorrow and in death. Elettra can only express her fury. The four characters are
drawn into a quartet that insists both on their distinct roles in this tragic predica-
ment and on the universality of the passions that they feel for distinct reasons.
Sometimes they sing as solitary individuals, then they sing as contrasting pairs,
then Ilia, Idamante, and Idomeneo unite at “Ah, il cor mi si divide [Ah, my heart
is torn asunder],” and finally all four converge at, “Soffrir più no si può [I can bear
no more. Worse than death is such great sorrow. A harsher lot, a greater pain no
one has ever borne].” Raaf initially objected to the quartet, complaining that it
gave no scope to his voice. “As if in a quartet the words should not be spoken much
more than sung,” Mozart wrote in exasperation to his father, who reassured him
that what was essential in quartets was “declamation and action.”97 Indeed, one of
the principle appeals of the quartet is that it momentarily suspends the persons of
the tragedy as if they were part of a single statuary group—arranged in thoughtful
relation to one another and to a common dramatic action, expressing pathos and
yet evincing the very ideality that Winckelmann and Schlegel so valued in Greek
sculpture and tragedy alike.98

94 Rushton, ed. (1993) 16.

95 Mozart, Letter to his Father, Munich, November 15, 1780 in Mozart (1985) 664.
96 Heartz (1990) 27–8.
97 Mozart, Letter to his Father, Munich, December 27, 1780; Leopold Mozart to his Son, Salzburg,
December 29, 1780; Mozart to his Father, Munich, December 30, 1780 in Mozart (1985) 699,
700, 702.
98 On this quartet, see Dent (1947) 61; Heartz (1980); and McClymonds (1996).
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Operatic Discoveries 195

Once Idamante has departed, Idomeneo feels the pressure of the priests to placate
Neptune: Thousands have died because of his indecision. But when he finally
confesses that his son is the promised victim, the people erupt in a display of the
spontaneous emotion appropriate to a chorus, “Oh voto tremendo [Oh terrible
vow! Oh horrible sight! Death reigns over us and has opened up the cruel abyss].”
As Julian Rushton observes, “the chorus breaks in at the top of a slow chromatic
ascent, imitated in the second phrase” by wind instruments that vent “a suppressed
cry of nature outraged.” When the people sorrowfully depart, a coda in C major
expresses “the serenity of despair.”99 Then, as the priests prepare for sacrifice in the
great hall of the temple of Neptune, their chant is interrupted by a D major fanfare
announcing that Idamante has slain the monster. Yet when Idamante appears on
stage, he is already robed in white and garlanded for sacrifice: He will triumph only
in death.
Idamante is so relieved to know that love, not odium, lay at the root of
his father’s rejection that he will willingly surrender his life. When his father
appears unable to proceed, Idamanate even bolsters his resolution, chiding that
love and pity cannot avert sacrifice. Yet as Idomeneo summons up the reso-
lution to slay his son, Ilia interjects herself on the altar, arguing that the will
of the gods has been misinterpreted. The opera thus gestures toward the sort of
sacrificial substitution with which Racine preserved a sense of poetic justice in
Iphigénie en Aulide (1674). But Idomeneo has another end in mind. Amid a great
subterranean commotion, an other-worldly voice announced by trombones like
those used in Gluck’s Alceste makes itself heard. Mozart wrote of this scene with
great excitement to his father: “Just think about it!—imagine yourself in the
theater; the voice has to convey a feeling of terror—it should go through and
through.”100 A month later, his father sent specific suggestions about how the
scene should be set:
I assume that you will choose very deep wind-instruments to accompany the subter-
ranean voice. How would it be if after the slight subterranean rumble the instruments
sustained, or rather began to sustain, their notes piano and then made a crescendo such as
might almost inspire terror, while after this and during the descendo the voice would begin
to sing? And there might be a terrifying crescendo at every phrase uttered by the voice.
Owing to the rumble, which must be short, and rather like the shock of a thunderbolt,
which sends up the figure of Neptune, the attention of the audience is aroused; and
this attention is intensified by the introduction of a quiet, prolonged and then swelling
and alarming wind-instruments passage, and finally becomes strained to the utmost
when, behold! a voice is heard.101
Its message is redemptive: Love has conquered, Idomeneo shall cease to be king,
and the young couple—the representatives of a new generation that has refused to
accept the sacrificial economy of its elders—will rule. Besieged by Furies, burning

99 Rushton, ed. (1993) 20.

100 Mozart, Letter to his Father, Munich, November 29, 1780 in Mozart (1985) 674.
101 Leopold Mozart to his Son, Salzburg, December 29, 1780 in Mozart (1985) 700.
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196 What Was Tragedy?

with the torments of Orestes and Ajax, Elettra exits to kill herself. Then, in the
­finale, Idomeneo abdicates and the young couple are crowned amid the song and
dance of the chorus. The substitution of son for father is complete: Idamante sings
his final aria in the regal key of D major, while Idomeneo recedes from politics
singing in his son’s characteristic key B flat. Fear and trembling have been purged
by wonder.
Varesco did not find this lieto fine in his source. In Fénelon’s novel, the father
stabs the son in a fury. In Crebillon’s tragedy, the son grabs the sword from his
father and dispatches himself. In Danchet and Campra’s tragédie en musique,
Nemesis goads Idoménée into killing his son. But Varesco’s change is not a craven
retreat from the tragic. It is an essential part of the poet’s quest to articulate a social
and political ideal founded on the social affections and the processes of sympa-
thetic identification, a vision of futurity that can only be realized if tragedy’s capacity
to exercise the passions is directed toward this end. Varesco announces his program
in Act 1, when two choruses, one representing the storm-tossed men at sea, the
other the onlookers on the shore, implore the gods for pity. Varesco refutes one of
the oldest explanations of tragic pleasure (found in Lucretius and made famous by
Hobbes), that we take pleasure in tragedies for the same reason that we gather to
watch shipwrecks from the shore: because we reflect upon our own security with
relief.102 No such reflection divides these choruses. It is the capacity for sympa-
thetic identification, a capacity that the libretto associates with self-sacrifice, that
liberates the central personages of the drama. As Descartes argues in The Passions of
the Soul (1649), the willingness to put one’s interests behind another’s is often
based on a capacious definition of the self. After observing that the passions that
an ambitious man feels for glory, a drunkard for wine, a brutish man for a woman
he wishes to violate, an honorable man for his friend or mistress, and a father for
his sons are similar to each other in that they all participate in love, he observes that
most of these men love only for the possession of the objects that they desire; they
do not love the objects themselves:
Whereas the Love a good Father bears to his children is so pure, that he desires to have
nothing of them, and would not possesse them otherwise than he does, nor be joyned
nearer to them than he is already: but considering them other Selfes [Les considerant
comme d'autres soy-mesme], he seeks out their good as he would his owne, or rather,
with more care, because, representing to himself that they and he make but one,
whereof he is not the better part, he oftentimes prefers their interests before his own,
and fears not his ruine to save them. The affections which men of honour bear to their
friends is of the very same nature, though it is seldom so perfect; and that they bear to
their Mistresse participates much of, but hath also a smatch of the other [i.e. desire for
possession].103
Ilia’s imaginative bond with her beloved is so strong that her offer to substitute
herself on the altar scarcely seems like a decision: She is already there. But even
Arbace, Idomeneo, and Idamante offer themselves for sacrifice, and when Idomeneo
abdicates, an act that is tantamount to self-sacrifice for a king, he is able to present

102 Hathaway (1947).   103 Descartes (1650) 64–5.

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Operatic Discoveries 197

his son to the people as “another myself,” that puzzling locution to which Descartes
resorted in an effort to explicate the motivation for such selfless acts. We might
say that, whereas the Trissino of Sofonisba pits virtù against fortuna, Varesco puts
his faith in the power of the social affections to weather her storms. What dis-
tinguishes both poets from their idealist and romantic heirs is their belief that
tragedy is a meditation on the moral response to haphazardness in this world,
not a demonstration of freedom that can succeed only if the hero is crushed by
dire necessity.
Mozart cherished Idomeneo above all his other works. It was the answer to his
youthful and fervent “desire to write operas . . . . But Italian, not German; seriosa,
not buffa.”104 When, two years after its performance, he and his wife Constanze
visited Salzburg, they, together with his father Leopold and his sister Nannerl, sang
the great quartet from Act 3. “He was so overcome that he burst into tears and quit
the chamber,” said Constanze, “and it was some time before I could console him.”
When the full score was published for the first time in 1806, the composer and
journalist J. F. Reichardt declared it “the purest work of art which our Mozart ever
completed.”105
But the notion that a cosmopolitan and classicizing court—whether Marie
Antoinette’s or Karl Theodor’s—could produce a universal masterpiece soon gave
way to the conviction that true art must express a national character. When Richard
Wagner produced Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide in Dresden in 1847, he worked to
purge the translation of “everything redolent of French taste”; cut Noverre’s ballets
altogether, thus affirming the nineteenth-century German conviction that dance
and tragic gravity did not mix; composed new transitions, postludes, and preludes
in order to emphasize Gluck’s association of musical ideas with the emotional
states of his stage persons; and revised the instrumentation, making a heavier use
of brass.106 What’s more, he rewrote the final act in order to eliminate the marriage
of Achilles and Iphigenia, instead introducing Artemis to claim Iphigenia as her
priestess: “I do not thirst for Iphigenia’s blood; it is her more elevated spirit I choose
[nichte dürste ich nach Iphigenia’s Blut; es ist ihr hoher Geist, den ich erkor].”
Purity, spirituality, and sacrifice displace the satisfaction of marriage promised in
Gluck’s revised Parisian livret. By introducing Greek names for the deities, rather
than retaining Gluck’s Roman ones, and by turning to Euripides rather than Racine
when revising his ending, Wagner was making a stridently nationalistic claim
about the privileged relationship between German and Hellenic culture, a culture
that was now perceived to be neither cosmopolitan nor simply ancient but Greek.
Wagner thus prepared the way for the music historian Emil Naumann to represent
Gluck’s search for “the historic land of the Hellenes” as a peculiarly Teutonic quest,
one undertaken in the company of Lessing, Winckelmann, Herder, and, of course,
Wagner himself. Gluck’s cosmopolitanism must be written out of history. The
German public was owed the honor of having first supported the new style, wrote
104 Mozart to his Father, Mannheim, February 4, 1778 in Mozart (1985) 460.
105 Berlinische musicalishche Zeitung 2 (1806) 11–12, quoted and trans. in Rushton, ed. (1993) 84.
106 R. Wagner (1983) 337. My discussion of Wagner’s production follows Goldhill (2011)
114–16.
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198 What Was Tragedy?

Naumann: “The assertion that these immortal works were written for a French
audience and not for his compatriots, unequal to their appreciation, is either a
wilful misstatement or ignorance.”107
The same nationalistic imperatives directed nineteenth-century accounts of
Mozart.108 Writing in 1856, after the unification of Germany, Otto Jahn seemed
to regret that the “German element” of Mozart’s nature “remained latent and
­inactive while he appropriated Italian art as his own,” but he consoled himself with
the thought that Mozart treated what he took from opera seria as “his own free
property” and turned it to account “with German thought and feeling.” “The fresh
new life which had awakened in German poetry, and which first caused a con-
sciousness of national existence to show itself in the realm of art,” would soon
enough seize Mozart’s “innermost being” and give him “a clear consciousness of his
capabilities as a German artist.”109 Some twenty years later, in a review of the first
Viennese production for sixty years, Eduard Hanslick diminished Idomeneo by
comparing it to the tragedies of Corneille and Racine: Mozart was to find his true
idiom, he declared, in the Shakespearean mixture of comedy and tragedy found in
Don Giovanni.110 In the early twentieth century, Ernst Lewicki produced a version
of the opera in Karlsruhne (1917) and Dresden (1925) that sought to eliminate
“all characteristic features of the old opera seria,” a project that Richard Strauss
continued in 1931, on the 150th anniversary of Idomeneo’s first performance.111
Collaborating with Clemens Krauss and Lothar Wallerstein, both of whom were
active in the Vienna State Opera, Strauss and his team translated Varesco’s libretto
into German; eliminated Elettra, substituting Ismene, a priestess of Poseiden, who
opposes Idamante’s love for Ilia on the grounds that marrying a Trojan slave would
defile the racial purity of the Cretans; made cuts to the recitative, arias, and final
ballet; and introduced new music, such as an orchestral interlude depicting the
gathering menace of the sea monster. Strauss deemed all these changes, which
brought Idomeneo in line with an ostensibly Teutonic tradition running through
Wagner, necessary to “win” Idomeneo “back for the German stage.”112 But as recently
as 1971, Charles Rosen declared that attempts to salvage Idomeneo for the repertoire
were futile.113
History has overtaken Rosen, but his confident pronouncement is a salutary
reminder that tastes change even after centuries of stability, and that what is
intractable to one critical system may be responsive to another. More recent critical
reassessments have classed Idomeneo among Mozart’s masterpieces, and glorious
performances of Idomeneo have proven that Edward Dent’s hope, expressed in
1948, that the work might set a “standard” of “dignity and nobility” for performers
and of “concentration and devotion” for audiences was precocious but not forlorn.114

107 Naumann (1984 [1880]) 4: 830, quoted in Goldhill (2011) 116.

108 My account of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of Idomeneo in this paragraph
relies on Rushton, ed. (1993) 83–94.
109 Jahn (1882 [1856]) 2: 145.    110 Hanslick (1971) 3: 107–14.
111 Angermüller (1975); Rushton, ed. (1993) 86.
112 Letter from Strauss to von Niessen, February 17, 1932.
113 Quoted in Cairns (2006) 53–4.    114 Dent (1948).
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Operatic Discoveries 199

Modern audiences can enjoy the cosmopolitan tragedy of the early modern period,
and the musical and ocular effects that were inspired by ancient testimonials to
Euripides’ power in performance can still contribute to, rather than simply distract
from, the ends of tragedy. In performance, Idomeneo demonstrates that a tragic
opera with a happy ending is no contradiction of terms.
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5
Counter-Reformation Tragedy
The Laurel and the Cypress

Even in the early modern period, poets, humanists, and churchmen disputed
whether sacred subjects should be treated on the tragic stage. “The theater loses all
its charm in the representation of sacred things,” writes the critic Saint-Évremond
in 1672, “and those sacred things lose much of the religious reputation that they
require when they are represented in the theater.”1 But not until Nietzsche securely
aligned tragedy with the spirit of Greek pessimism did critical orthodoxy begin to
deny the possibility of Christian tragedy altogether. A chorus of twentieth-century
critics assure us that “Christianity is in every sense antagonistic to the spirit of tra-
gedy”; that “No genuinely Christian tragedy can exist”; that “Nothing in literature
has yet come forth that is both Christian and tragedy at the same time”; that
“Christian tragedy is not Christian; if it were, it would not be tragedy.”2 Going one
better, George Steiner declares tragedy alien to the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.
Whereas Attic tragedy presupposes that necessity is blind, that “man’s encounter
with it shall rob him of his eyes,” and that “the forces which shape or destroy our
lives lie outside the governance of reason or justice,” the “Judaic spirit is vehement
in its conviction that the order of the universe and of man’s estate are accessible
to reason.” Where there is reason and compensation, concludes Steiner, there is
no tragedy.3
In reality, these denials of Christian tragedy are not always as absolute as their
opening gambits imply, for critics such as Steiner and Laurence Michel (a member
of the chorus) later concede that “Jansenism and Calvinism . . . do indeed provide
a powerful support for tragedy.”4 The former theological system was outlined by
­Cornelius Jansen in his Augustinus (1640). It was transmitted to the convent
of Port-Royal by his friend Du Vergier de Hauranne, Abbot of Saint-Cyran; and
thence, according to one school of criticism, it was imprinted on the imagination of
Racine, who lived and was educated there. It is not difficult for Lucian Goldmann,
who interprets Racine through a Marxist strain of the idealist philosophy of the

1 De la Tragédie ancienne et moderne in Saint-Évremond (1969) 4: 174–5.

2 Kwang-Tsien (1933) 236; Jaspers (1952) 38–9; Laurence Michel (1956) 403; Sewall (1980) 157.
3 Steiner (1961) 5, 6–7, 4, 134. Walter Kaufmann (1972) 342 concurs: There can be no “Jewish or
Christian tragedy.” For a recent dissent, see Eagleton (2003) 39 and for some historical contextualiza-
tion of such views, see Leonard (2012) 94–104.
4 I quote Laurence Michel (1956) 425. But Steiner (1961) 133–5 clearly has the same exceptions
in mind when he classes Faustus, Macbeth, and Phèdre together as heroes and heroines who face the
realness of hell.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 201

tragic, to identify “the principal categories of tragic morality” in Jansenism: “con-

version, absolute distance from the world and from God, . . . the impossibility for
man to reduce, by however little, the chasm separating him from both of them,”
and, as a consequence, his “absolute solitude.”5 Calvinism, on the other hand, can
generate a tragic vision in which the hero’s movement toward his pre-destined
damnation is dramatized, as it is in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth, as the “temporal
disintegration of a human soul.”6 Yet, however satisfying we may find this identifi-
cation of an implicit philosophy of the tragic in Jansenism and Calvinism (theologies
that in Kantian terms stress necessity at the expense of freedom), it avails us little
in the case of Catholic dramatists such as the Jesuits, who defined themselves in
virulent opposition to both these strains of Augustinian piety and who wrote many
species of drama—including martyr tragedies—that cannot be described as tra-
gedies of damnation. According to critical orthodoxy, damnation can be tragic, but
martyrdom cannot.7
As we shall see, an Aristotelean version of this argument was current in the early
modern period, but Friedrich Schiller was among the first to cast it in idealist
terms. In a passage that we noted in chapter 1, Schiller maintains that a hero who
is consoled in death with thoughts of immortality cannot produce the effects of the
sublime because the promise of eternal life diminishes death’s fearfulness and con-
soles our sensuous nature, which must be “completely set aside” if we are to be left
with “reason alone” for reassurance.8 Hegel and Nietzsche add other reasons to
dismiss counter-reformation tragedy as a historical dead-end, if not a logical
contradiction. For in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that, while art was
the highest expression of the absolute for the Greeks, the Reformation ushered in
an age when art, conscious of its limits, pointed to a higher form of consciousness.
With the advent of modernity, religion and art were sundered, and art had to find
its subject not in the divine but in the human being. Hegel considered that in his
own day, modern society had become too complex to be realized in a living work
of art. Art had yielded its purpose to the philosophy of art, and the art religion of
the past could only be appreciated, like a museum object, for its beautiful appear-
ances, rather than its departed spirit.9 In this influential narrative of moderniza-
tion, the Reformation marks the limit of Christian art, the artistic flowering of
the Tridentine Church is entirely ignored, and the continuing vitality of an art

5 Goldmann (1972) 30. On Racine and Jansenism, also see Benichou (1971) 75–167. For argu-
ments that question or discount the importance of Jansenism to Racine’s tragic vision, see Sellier
(1979); Bruneau (1986); Zwierlein (2006) 50–2. The Jesuits, who were staunch opponents of the
Jansenists, obviously saw no Jansenist taint in Racine’s works, for they performed them in their col-
leges; see Yanitelli (1943) 86–9.
6 Waswo (1974) 78. Other essays on Doctor Faustus or Macbeth as Christian tragedies include
Myrick (1941); Bernad (1962); Ornstein (1968); Battenhouse (1969) ch. 3, and, for an excellent
account of the theological differences between the A and B texts of Doctor Faustus, Marcus
(1989).
7 Jarrett-Kerr (1965) 368.    8 On the Sublime in Schiller (1995) 32.
9 See Hegel (1997 [1807]) 455–6 and (1920 [1835]) 1: 125–44. These are discussed in David
Roberts (2011) 50–3. The literature on Hegel’s Phenomenology is large, but see Pippin (1988); Pinkard
(1994); and Forster (1998). On the text’s treatment of tragedy, see Schulte (1992); Menke (1996);
Speight (2001); George (2006); and Billings (2014) ch. 6.
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202 What Was Tragedy?

subordinated to socio-religious purposes is denied. Because so much of the schol-

arship done on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tragedy has been bound up
with teleological narratives of modernization and secularization—these constitute
one of the chief attractions of the early modern as the denomination of a period—
scholars have naturally gravitated toward tragedians, such as Shakespeare, who
lend themselves to such stories.
Hegel’s view that Protestant iconoclasm marks an advance in the history of
Spirit finds a curious echo in Nietzsche’s rejection of Italy’s “culture of the opera,”
with its reliance on a “word-and-tone-rhetoric” to paint the passions and on-stage
machines to manufacture visions.10 If Greek tragedy presents an “Apollinian illusion
whose influence aims to deliver us from the Dionysian flood and excess,” that illu-
sion is “broken and annihilated” at “the most essential point”: “In the total effect
of Tragedy,” the Dionysian spirit of music “predominates,” and “the Apollinian
illusion reveals itself as what it really is—the veiling during the performance of
the tragedy of the real Dionysian effect.”11 With its recuperation of the visual,
Tridentine art could not present itself as an heir to the spirit of Greek tragedy as
Nietzsche conceived it.12 He looked instead to the German Reformation, which
had sprung forth from an “abyss” of “primordial power,” sounding “the future tune
of German music”: “So deep, courageous, and spiritual, so exuberantly good and
tender did this chorale of Luther sound—as the first Dionysian luring call breaking
forth from dense thickets at the approaching spring.”13
Whether or not they endorse the entirety of Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s grand
narratives, a great many literary critics have concluded that they may, in any
case, ignore counter-reformation tragedy. In The Spirit of Tragedy, Herbert Joseph
Muller offers a dismissal that may stand for many others. In contrast to the
Elizabethan Age, he writes, the spirit of the Spanish Golden Age was medieval: “For
Spain remained orthodox, Catholic, hierarchical; and Spain wrote no tragedy.”14
It will be one of the tasks of this chapter to ask what tragedy meant to counter-­
reformation Catholics, but there can be no doubt that they called a great many
plays tragedies. Between 1556 and 1773, when the order was dissolved by order
of the Pope, the Jesuits alone may have produced 100,000 “solemn tragedies.”15
They staged these at the 750 universities and colleges that they opened during

10 Nietzsche (1967) 116–17.

11 Nietzsche (1967) 129–30. On Nietzsche’s increasing identification of his philosophical enter-
prise with Dionysus, see Brogan (2000).
12 On the recovery of the visible by the Council of Trent, see Dupront (1960) 195–243. On its
relevance to Jesuit drama, see Filippi (2006) 516–20.
13 Nietzsche (1967) 136–7.
14 Herbert Muller (1956) 149. For essays that confirm how widespread attitudes like Muller’s are,
even among Hispanists, but that attempt to overturn them, see A. A. Parker (1962) and (1973), and
Parr (1980), the last of which, however, suffers from its starting point: the distilled, idealist philosophy
of the tragic current in the mid-twentieth century.
15 For the estimate, which is based on colleges performing an average of two plays per year, see
McCabe (1983) 36, 47. In 1555, colleges averaged less than one per year, but in exceptional cases,
such as Billom, France in 1557, a college might produce as many as eight. Performance schedules
­became more regular with time. For additional details on the first decade of productions, see Fois
(1995) 84–90.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 203

those years, some located next to seats of power such as Rome, Paris, Munich,
and Vienna, where they entertained monarchs and princes of the church and had
access to the finest composers, musicians, and dancing masters of the day; others
scattered as far afield as Brazil, Mexico, India, and the Philippines.16 The global
reach of the Jesuits was already apparent in 1633 when the Puritan William Prynne
published his giant anti-theatrical treatise Histrio-mastix, which deplores the “his-
trionicall” Society of Jesus for bringing their interludes and stage plays “to their
Indian Proselites.”17
In some cases, the Jesuits used ancient texts for their performances. In others,
they wrote new versions of tragic legends such as the blinding of Oedipus or the
sacrifice of Iphigenia in Aulis. Still more often, they took up episodes from the Old
Testament, such as Saul’s jealousy of David (1 Samuel 18), Nebuchadnezzar’s cap-
ture and torture of King Zedekiah and his sons after the siege of Jerusalem (2 Kings
25: 1–7), or Jael’s slaying of Sisera (Judges 4: 2–3). But what really distinguishes
Jesuit tragedies from those of contemporary Protestant humanists, who also pro-
duced a repertoire of sacred tragedies but tended to limit themselves to biblical
subjects, is the frequency with which they dramatize minor episodes in the history
of the Church, whether in Rome, Byzantium, or Persia. Some of these contain
such a withering analysis of the human potential for violence, ambition, and delu-
sion that they could have achieved their didactic intent only indirectly, by arousing
a sense of revulsion at the prospect of a life propelled by no motives higher than
lust, avarice, and a thirst for conquest. But others bring the pagan and the Christian
into collision, striving to arouse not just pity and fear but admiration for those
Christian martyrs who, renouncing the carnal world, suffered the most brutal tortures
with a true tranquility of spirit and perished as a sublime example to the faithful.
Many of these tragedies also evoke the grandeur of the empires of late antiquity not
simply to stage the historical triumph of Christianity over paganism but to make
claims about the nature of the true church, implicitly refuting the characterization
of the early church advanced by Lutheran scholars in the Magdeburg Centuries
(1559–74) and asserting the legitimacy of the Papacy’s use of temporal means to
achieve spiritual ends.
In support of this theatrical culture, Jesuits wrote and promulgated some of the
period’s most important treatises on poetics, perspective, dramatic music, dance,
and theatrical action.18 And they trained generations of young men who made
their mark on the theater, including the Spaniards Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso
de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca, the Frenchmen Pierre and Thomas Corneille,
Alain-René Le Sage, Molière, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot, the Germans Jacob
Bidermann and Andreas Gryphius, and the Italians Torquato Tasso, Gabriello
Chiabrera, Giulio Rospigliosi, Carlo Goldoni, and Francesco Scipione Maffei.
Some of these pupils remained on life-long terms of intimacy with their teachers,
while others, such as Voltaire and Diderot, distinguished themselves by their
free-thinking.

16 On this missionary arm of the theater in Mexico, see Trexler (1987) 575–613.
17 Prynne (1633) 117.    18 Bjurström (1972) and Mamczarz (1995).
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204 What Was Tragedy?

Specialists have recently produced some admirable archival studies of the

t­ heatrical activities of specific colleges.19 But, despite its historical prominence, the
Jesuit theater remains neglected by mainstream critics of early modern tragedy
because it fails to meet the expectations raised by our philosophy of the tragic and
the literary histories that support it. As a corrective measure, I want to dwell on
Bernardino Stefonio’s neo-Latin Crispus, which was produced in the Collegio
­Romano of the Jesuits in 1597. But I also propose to consider Pedro Calderón de
la Barca’s 1629 The Constant Prince (El príncipe constante) and Pierre Corneille’s
1644 Polyeucte. Although these will be familiar to a larger number of readers, they
serve two functions in this chapter. They demonstrate how dramatists who were
trained in Jesuit colleges and who remained on cordial terms with the order
throughout their lives could adapt the principles of Jesuit dramaturgy to widely
different theatrical conditions while producing plays that the Society of Jesus was
glad to re-appropriate.20 And because they attracted a vigorous tradition of com-
mentary running from the Aristotelean critics of the seventeenth century through
the idealist and romantic critics of the early nineteenth, they also permit us to
follow the fluctuating fortunes of counter-reformation tragedy through the critical
revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Examining these tragedies should equip us to approach the poetics of
counter-reformation tragedy that emerged from the Collegio Romano in the dec-
ades after the success of Crispus. Because the Jesuits always made concessions to
local theatrical traditions and customs, no single college can epitomize the whole.21
But professors at the Collegio Romano authored the official plan for Jesuit educa-
tion known as the Ratio Studiorum, and their practices were accepted as the surest
guide to its proper implementation.22 The plays and treatises produced there thus
acquired a special authority. I have already had occasion to cite Bernardino Stefonio’s
successors at the Collegio Romano among the many authorities who contributed
to the early modern poetics of tragedy discussed in chapters 1 and 2, but at this point
they deserve a fuller introduction. Tarquinio Galluzzi, professor of humanities and
rhetoric at the college, wrote Vindications of Virgil and Three Commentaries on Tra-
gedy, Comedy, and Elegy (1621), published the polemical treatises The Renovation of
Ancient Tragedy and A Defense of “Crispus” as an ensemble (1633), and, from 1632
19 Although Jesuit theater has received renewed attention in the past two decades, it remains
understudied. The best introductions in English are McCabe (1983) and Filippi (2006). Jesuit plays
appear in the larger context of neo-Latin dramatic activity in Bloemendal and Norland, eds.
(2013). The essays gathered in Chiabò and Doglio, eds. (1995) also form an excellent introduction.
For further bibliography, see Oldani and Bredeck (1996); Nigel Griffin (1995b); and additional
sources listed in my own bibliography. On the theater of the Collegio Romano, see Quarta (1995);
Filippi (1995) and (2006); Fumaroli (1996) 138–70; and Chevalier (2013a) 72–84.
20 Calderón de la Barca entered the Jesuit Colegio Imperial in Madrid at the age of eight, wrote his
first play for the public at the age of fourteen, and remained on close terms with members of the order
until his death, bequeathing his most treasured crucifixes to two of them. He wrote verses on the sanc-
tification of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a play on the life of the Jesuit Baltasar de Loyola, and many autos
sacramentales influenced by Jesuit aesthetics. See Vallanueva (1973) and Lumsden-Kouvel (2000)
105–6. On Corneille’s Jesuit education and ties to Delidel, see Couton (1949) 302–4, Fumaroli
(1979), and Triboulet (1985) 773.
21 This point is stressed in Nigel Griffin (1995a).
22 The Constitutions part 4, ch. 7, n. 2, Declaratio C in Ignatius (1970) 199.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 205

to 1645, produced what may be the most extensive commentary on Aristotle’s

Nichomachean Ethics ever produced, running to 1,900 folio pages. In the recent
assessment of Jill Kraye, “The vastness of Galluzzi’s erudition almost justifies the
size of the commentary.”23 His fellow professor of rhetoric, Alessandro Donati, was
still remembered by eighteenth-century travelers as the author of an invaluable
guide to the ancient sites of Rome. But in his own day, he won fame for his tra-
gedies Pirimalus Celiani princeps (1622), performed to celebrate the canonizations
of Sts. Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier; Suevia (1629), performed in the
Seminario Romano; The Art of Poetry (1631); and his Latin epic Constantine, Lib-
erator of Rome (1640).24 Pietro Sforza Pallavicino was a professor of philosophy
rather than rhetoric and filled the chair in theology from 1643 to 1651, but his
first major literary undertaking as a Jesuit was Ermenegildo martire (1644), a tragedy
on St. Hermenegild, who rebelled against his father, Leovigild of Spain, and whose
defeat, exile, and death were celebrated as a martyrdom in the struggle against
Arian Christianity thanks to Pope Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. Pallavicino rose
to fame as a taste-maker in the Rome of Bernini, as a systematic theologian charged
with examining the doctrines of Jansen, and as author of the authoritative History
of the Council of Trent (Istoria del Concilio di Trento, 1656–57), the papal response to
Paolo Sarpi’s damaging account of the council (1619). But the youthful treatise on
tragedy that he wrote to complement Ermenegildo remains of interest because it
reaffirms some aspects of Jesuit dramaturgy while seeking to reform others in light
of the contemporary practice of Corneille and others. These will be our chief
guides to the counter-reformation poetics of tragedy, whose peculiarities should
become the more apparent when we turn to the critical theories of the idealists. To
the best of my knowledge, no idealist took much interest in a Jesuit repertoire written
in Latin and based on the example of Seneca, himself a profoundly derivative and
untheatrical poet in the brutally unfair but influential assessment of August Wilhelm
Schlegel.25 But their admiration for Calderón, a vernacular dramatist whom they
could assimilate to their ideal of romantic poetry, inspired them to produce theories
of Christian tragedy that can be profitably tested and sharpened against a broader
field of counter-reformation dramas. Before we approach either the plays or the
theories directly, however, we should turn back to the conversion of St. Ignatius of
Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits.

T R A G E D Y A S S P I R I T U A L E X E RC I S E

As a young nobleman of undaunted courage (by his own account), Ignatius mod-
eled his conduct on that of the knights errant of chivalric romance. When the
French laid siege to the citadel of Pampeluna, Ignatius persuaded the commander

23 Kraye (2012) 1281.

24 Fumaroli (1996) 138–70 discusses Stefonio and Galluzzi in detail; also see Chevalier (2013)
72–84 on them. On Piramalus, see Filippi (2005). On Donati’s Ars Poetica, see Tjoelker (2015) 35–6;
Bauer (1994) 213–15.
25 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 211–12.
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206 What Was Tragedy?

to resist their assault, overruling the more prudent council of his fellow nobles.
Even after the walls had been destroyed, he continued to fight bravely until a
canon ball shattered his leg. The French, impressed with his gallant stand, treated
him well and gave him the best medical care they could provide until he could
be removed on a litter to Loyola. His recovery was slow, however, and his doc-
tors d­ ecided that his leg should be cut open and the bone reset. “During the
operation,” says Ignatius, who dictated his Autobiography in the third person,
“as in all he suffered before and after, he uttered no word and gave no sign of
suffering save that of tightly clenching his fists.” He became so wasted that the
doctors gave up all hope of his recovery and told him to prepare for death, but
after receiving the sacrament on the eve of the feasts of Saints Peter and Paul, he
began to recover his strength. But that was not the end of his suffering, for one
of the bones of his healing leg began to protrude below his knee, leaving one leg
shorter than the other. Ignatius could not bear the deformity because he intended
to live a life at court, so he asked if the doctors could cut the bone away: “They
replied that they could, but it would cause him more suffering than all that had
preceded, as everything was healed, and they would need space in order to cut
it. He determined, however, to undergo this torture. His elder brother looked
on with astonishment and admiration. He said he could never have had the for-
titude to suffer the pain which the sick man bore with his usual patience.” In
order that the leg might regain its length, the doctors kept it stretched for many
days, causing ­exquisite agony.26
Once he was out of danger but still unable to rise from his bed, Ignatius “asked
for some romances to pass away the time,” but the only books in the house were
Spanish translations of Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ and Jacopo de Voragine’s
Golden Legend. This reading, says Ignatius, led him to “meditate on holy things”;
he found himself particularly inspired by the heroic feats of penance performed by
the desert eremites memorialized in the Golden Legend. Yet for a time, his “heroic
resolutions” to act like St. Francis or St. Dominic had to compete for his attention
with “vain and worldly thoughts.” Eventually he observed that “when he thought
of worldly things it gave him great pleasure, but afterwards he found himself dry
and sad; whereas when he thought of journeying to Jerusalem, and of living only
on herbs, and of practicing austerities, he found pleasure not only while thinking
of them, but also when he had ceased.” So Ignatius began his “reasoning on spir-
itual matters.”27
He concluded that the passions must have their rightful place in any well-
ordered and well-directed life. St. Augustine arrives at the same conclusion in the
City of God after reviewing the doctrines of the Stoics and of Aristotle’s followers,
the Peripatetics. Whereas the former treat all passions as ulcers of the mind, the
latter, with whom Augustine sides, maintain that our ēthos and our propensity to
act for good or for ill depend on habits of feeling. “The point,” says Augustine,
“is that Scripture subordinates the higher mind itself to God, to be governed
and succoured by him, and puts the passions into keeping of the mind, to be so

26 Ignatius (1900) 19–23.    27 Ignatius (1900) 24–7.

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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 207

regulated and restrained as to be servants of righteousness. Consequently, in our

system we do not so much ask whether a religious mind will become angry, but
rather what should make it angry, nor whether it will be sad, but what should
make it sad, nor whether it should be afraid, but what will make it afraid” (City
of God 9.5).28 St. Thomas Aquinas agrees. The error of the Stoics, he explains in
his lengthy “Treatise of the Passions” in the Summa Theologiae, is to fail to distin-
guish between the intellectual and sensitive appetite (1a2ae.24.2.res.), leading
them to confuse passions with motions of the will. Aquinas, on the contrary,
holds that the passions can make a positive contribution to our moral lives. If
one acts on the basis of a rational judgment and the act is accompanied by a pas-
sion that obeys reason, the passion can augment the moral goodness of the act in
one of two ways. Either the motion of the higher part of the soul can overflow
into the sensitive appetite, causing a passion that is a sign of the intensity of the
will; or a man may choose “from judgment of reason to be affected by some pas-
sion, so that he may work more promptly by means of the co-working of the
sensitive appetite” (1a2ae.24.3 ad 1m).29 To believe that humans can attain their
full good without attending to their passions and their bodily acts is to fall
into the sin of angelism: “Just as it is better that man should both will good and
do it in his exterior act, so also does it belong to the perfection of moral good,
that man should be moved toward the good not only according to will, but also
according to sensitive appetite, following what is said in Psalm 83.3: ‘My heart
and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God’: where we are to take ‘heart’ (cor)
for the intellectual appetite, and ‘flesh’ (carnis) for the sensitive appetite” (24.3.co).
Whereas Kant valorizes acts done in accordance with the moral law and contrary
to the inclinations because these demonstrate our moral liberty, Aquinas prefers
to imagine the intellect or reason governing the sensitive soul as a ruler governs
free subjects who can resist his command. Ideally, the sensitive appetite of a
­virtuous person should dispose him to desire what reason alone would elect
(1.81.3 ad 2m).
The importance of Aquinas’ “Treatise of the Passions” to Ignatius can scarcely be
overstated. Indeed, the Spiritual Exercises are predicated on the capacity of the
exercitent to elect, in the words of Aquinas, “from judgment of reason to be affected
by some passion.”30 Their professed purpose is “preparing and disposing our soul
to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking
and finding God’s will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul.”31
Under the guidance of a spiritual director, the exercitent makes a four-week retreat
in which he inserts himself in mentally staged dramas that rehearse (among other
things) scenes from the passion of Christ. He must visualize these in vivid detail,
composing the place, introducing the persons, attending to the costumes, the ges-
tures, and the dialogue. These are not visions but scenes vividly realized in the

28 Augustine (1957–72).
29 Jordan (1986) 92; Miner (2009) 91. I follow Miner’s translations in this paragraph.
30 For a brief introduction to the Spiritual Exercises, see O’Malley (1993) 37–50. For additional
bibliography, see Begheyn and Bogart (1991).
31 Ignatius (1969), no. 1.
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208 What Was Tragedy?

mind’s eye and calculated to stir intense feelings of grief, fear, horror, wonder,
­admiration, joy, or love. Because these perturbations may be instigated by either
good or evil spirits, however, it is incumbent on the exercitent to assess their true
nature by considering their origins and envisioning their consequences in a process
known as the “discernment of spirits.”32 These spiritual exercises can help the exer-
citent make a good election, a decisive life-choice in which he aligns his own will
freely with God’s.
Opposed to what he saw as a Lutheran assault on the liberty of the human crea-
ture, Ignatius warned his brethren in his “Rules for Thinking with the Church”
“not to speak of grace at such length and with such emphasis that the poison of
doing away with liberty is engendered.”33 The most famous attempt to answer that
directive was Luis de Molina’s The Compatibility of Free Choice with the Gifts of
Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination, and Reprobation, better
known by its short Latin title, the Concordia (1588).34 Maintaining that God’s
providence can be reconciled with freedom and indeterminism in the created
world, Molina expands the range of God’s pre-volitional knowledge to include a
middle knowledge of conditional future contingents (futuribilia), a knowledge of
how created causes will act in hypothetical circumstances. This middle knowledge
permits God to extend sufficient grace to all while foreseeing the circumstances in
which humans will freely accept or resist it. While preserving God’s providence by
insisting on his perfect knowledge of futurabilia, it makes salvation dependent on
man’s free will. This attempt to preserve the autonomy of humans and the infalli-
bility of providence, which was exhaustively scrutinized by a papal Commission on
Grace from 1597 to 1607, would furnish Jesuit tragedy with one of its structuring
principles.35
It is not surprising that Jesuits who knew the story of Ignatius’ conversion and
who had experienced the curative effects of the Spiritual Exercises, which professed
to purge the soul of its disordered affections and then illuminate it, should see in
tragedy the potential for a complimentary gymnasium of the passions.36 For tra-
gedy, which dramatizes fateful elections, impresses us with the conviction that
every human choice is paradigmatic. It furthermore asks spectators to follow a
chain of events, to discern the pattern in a life, to note the collisions and coinci-
dences between that life and some overarching design, to judge, feel, reflect, and
judge again as a habit of being. It holds that spiritual anguish and carnal suffering
can be turned to account. And, at least according to Aristotle’s Poetics, it under-
takes to rid the soul of disordered affections by the paradoxical means of arousing
the most powerful passions.

32 On the rules for the “discernment of spirits,” see Ignatius (1969) nos. 313–36; Rahner (1968)
136–80; Toner (1982); Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle (1983).
33 Ignatius (1969) no. 369.
34 For a partial translation of the Concordia with a useful introduction, see Molina (1988). For
accounts of Molinism, see Pegis (1939) and Flint (1988).
35 For an historical account of the controversy over grace, see Brodrick (1928) ch. 19.
36 For other attempts to tease out connections between the Spiritual Exercises and theater, see
Matteo (1993) and Heinrich Pfeiffer (1994).
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 209

Yet the mechanism by which tragedy could accomplish such a wonderful effect
remained a matter of debate in early modernity, as it does today.37 The Jesuit under-
standing of catharsis turned on two questions. First, was its object to eradicate the
passions or to temper and reduce them? And second, did tragedy achieve that end
by whipping the passions up to a fever pitch until they were released in sighs, groans,
and tears that could carry off what was excessive, impure, or importunate in them?
Or did it exercise the judgment and the sensitive appetites of spectators like a gym-
nasium for the passions?
When answering the first question, the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano endorse
Alessandro Piccolomini’s conclusion that Aristotle could not have meant that tragedy
should eradicate the passions, for although the Stoics may have favored such a goal,
Aristotle says that all the passions are necessary to human life. This is a belief that
Augustine and Aquinas share, as we have seen. But it is desirable, says Piccolomini,
“to purge, to moderate, and (in sum) to reduce them to a certain good temperance;
the rule and the measure of that tempering lie in putting them under the control of
reason, and whenever they are brought to conform to it, they can be called moder-
ated or purged.”38 “Aristotle calls this training and this levelness of spirit [doctrinam,
atque hanc aequibilitatem animi] which we acquire for ourselves from the use
of tragedies a purgation and a healing [curiationem],” writes Galluzzi, “because by
watching the misfortunes of others fear and pity is lessened—as though it were
cleansed away by medicine [medicina detergitur]—and is reduced back to the rea-
sonable moderation in which is placed health and strength.”39 Donati, who may
have been particularly conscious of Piccolomini’s views because they both hailed
from Sienna, explicitly refers his readers to his account of catharsis, concluding:
“That which is cured is not extinguished. Neither does he extinguish the body who
cures the afflicted body of disease. But the perturbations of the soul are not cured by
any other manner, unless it be they accept a certain measure and moderation.”40
As they argue that catharsis is not merely a discharge of emotion, the Jesuits
stress that for Aristotle, to be virtuous is to know what the true nature of the pas-
sions is, to understand what sorts of persons and events are in theory worthy
of particular responses, to judge specific cases rightly, and to feel an appropriate
affective response as a matter of habit. They thus follow the first line of interpret-
ation that we considered in chapter 2, citing Robortello and Heinsius as two of its
principal exponents. Among the Jesuits, René Rapin gave this interpretation of
catharsis as training and exercise its most influential formulation:
The Philosopher had observ’d two important faults in Man to be regulated, pride, and
hardness of Heart, and he found for both Vices a cure in Tragedy. For it makes man

37 Useful discussions of the subject include Susemihl and Hicks (1894) 641–56; Bywater (1909)
152–61, 361–5; Else (1967) 224–32, 423–47; Aristotle (1981) 133ff.; Golden (1992) 5–39; Lear
(1992); Charles Segal (1996); and Belfiore (1992) 257–360. Weinberg (1961) chs. 9–12 records many
cinquecento accounts of catharsis. For a more focused analysis, see Hathaway (1962) pt. 3.
38 Piccolimini (1575) 102. Also see sig. [††7].    39 Galluzzi (1621) 253.
40 The first edition is Alessandro Donati, Ars poetica (Rome, 1631); subsequent editions were
printed in Cologne (1633); Bologna (1659); and Venice (1684). I refer here and elsewhere to the
­Cologne edition of 1633; see 107.
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210 What Was Tragedy?

modest, by representing the great Masters of the Earth humbled; and it makes him
tender and merciful, by shewing him on the Theatre the strange Accidents of Life, and
unforeseen disgraces to which the most important persons are subject. But because
Man is naturally timorous, and compassionate, he may fall into another extreme, to
be either too fearful, or too full of pity; the too much fear may shake the constancy of
Mind, and the too great compassion may enfeeble the Equity. ‘Tis the business of Tra-
gedy to regulate these two weaknesses. . . . But as the end of Tragedy is to teach Men not
to fear too weakly the common Misfortunes, and manage their fear; it makes account
also to teach them to spare their compassion, for objects that deserve it. For there is an
injustice in being mov’d at the Afflictions of those who deserve to be miserable. One
may see without pity Clytemnestra slain by her Son Orestes in Eschylus, because she had
cut the Throat of Agamemnon her Husband; and one cannot see Hippolytus dye by
plot of his Stepmother Phadra in Euripides, without compassion; because he died not
but for being chaste and virtuous.41
Rapin implicitly interprets “such [soio�sxm]” in Aristotle’s catharsis clause—
“through pity and fear effecting the purgations of such passions”—to define classes
of passions to which pity and fear belong. Excessive compassion and hardness of
heart belong to a set of passions whose ideal is just pity. Timorousness and pride
belong to the same set of passions as fear. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle
explains that in order to attain a praiseworthy median, it is sometimes necessary to
incline to an excess or a deficiency (1109b24–5). Because human nature often tends
toward a vicious extreme, “it is necessary to drag ourselves in the opposite direction;
for by drawing ourselves far away from error, we will arrive at the intermediate, just
as those do who straighten warped wood” (1109b4–7).42 Rapin seems to suppose
that, perhaps thanks to its frequent revolutions of the passions, a single tragedy can
have diverse effects on the audience, mollifying the hard of heart and fortifying the
timorous as their dispositions require. This account of catharsis was adopted almost
verbatim by John Dryden in his Grounds of Criticism of Tragedy (1679), the most
important account of tragedy produced in seventeenth-century England.43
The Jesuits’ account of catharsis as a process entailing the discernment of spirits,
intellectual clarification, and the rectification of the passions meant that catharsis
might coincide with spiritual conversion or take the milder form of a continuing
regime of self-care. The story of St. Genesius, the patron saint of actors, which is
dramatized in several Latin, French, and Spanish plays of the seventeenth
­century, including Lope de Vega’s 1618 The True Make-believe (Lo Fingido verda-
dero) and Jean Rotrou’s 1647 The True Saint Genesius (Le Véritable Saint-Genest),
dramatizes the power of borrowed passions not only to train our habitus but to
convert it.44 Routrou’s version, a work inspired by the success of Corneille’s Polyeucte

41 Rapin (1694 [1674]) 109–10.

42 For more on this imagery of correction—together with the related imagery of heating and tem-
pering iron—see Belfiore (1992) 327–31; I follow her translation of this passage at 327.
43 Grounds of Criticism of Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 231–2. However, Dryden
stresses tragedy’s capacity to make man tender and merciful; he seems less concerned that “too great
compassion may enfeeble Equity.”
44 For the texts, see Vega (1955) and Rotrou (1999). For critical appreciations, see Nelson (1969),
Szarota (1967) 24–57, and Witt (2009).
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 211

and Tristan l’Hermite’s Crispus, opens with Genest rehearsing to play the role
of Adrian, a Roman minister who, impressed by the conviction of the Christians
whom he was persecuting, converted to Christianity and, urged on by his wife
Natalia, herself a convert, offered his limbs up to be broken on an anvil. The play-
within-a-play is a French translation of the S. Adrianus of Louis Cellot, S.J., author
of three of the eleven plays in the only officially promulgated anthology of Jesuit
dramas, Select Tragedies of the Society of Jesus (Selectæ Patrum Societatis Jesu Tragoediæ
[Antwerp, 1634]).45 As Genest rehearses, he finds he is losing himself in his part.
He is in fact, as well as in name, someone else whose Christian feelings have become
his own. Whereas he had been accustomed to transforming himself continually
for roles, this time he wants to remain true to the habitus of Adrian (ll. 401–10).
As Adrian, Genest is constantly asked to judge, or at least to act as if he has prop-
erly judged, what persons and events should rightly be feared or pitied: A tyrant
should not be feared, despite his alarming physical displays of wrath, and a back-
sliding Christian should not be pitied, regardless of whether you are bound to
him by the closest ties of affection and family. As Genest, he must discern the source
of the spirit that is moving him, and he concludes that it is the grace of God. At
last, Genest interrupts the performance, declaring that the play is not a play and
that he is both the image and the player of himself (ll. 1325–30). He has experi-
enced one sort of purgation—an intellectual clarification and rectification of his
passions—which is consummated by another sort of lustration in his blood sac-
rifice. By the time Lope de Vega and Rotrou wrote their plays, the Jesuits were
already in the habit of invoking the example of the saint to justify their theatrical
activities. For example, Stefonio reported that “the miracle of St. Genesius” was
repeated in the case of three students who announced their intention to enter the
novitiate after acting in Crispus.46 The consequences of participating in the tragic
theater could on occasion be life-altering.
Yet the Jesuits’ preference for describing catharsis as a cure or a care suggests that
its effects are not limited to conversion. In order to understand what they mean by
cure, we must consider the sense of the word in both pastoral and medical dis-
course, for the passions were supposed not only to affect the soul but to be rooted
“deep within the body.”47 Galenic physicians held that the physical health of the
body was largely determined by the balance of the four humoral fluids that were
produced by the body in the process of digesting food. The natural, vital, and animal
spirits, which served as liaisons between the body and mind, were the results of
further processes of refinement. Through these spirits, the body could dispose the
mind toward thoughts, and the mind could affect the body. “As the body works
upon the mind by his bad humours, troubling the spirits, sending gross fumes into
the brain, and so per consequens disturbing the soul, and all the faculties of it . . . ,”
writes Robert Burton, “so, on the other side, the mind most effectually works upon
the body producing by his passions and perturbations miraculous alterations, as

45 On Cellot, see Chevalier (2013b) 440–6, with earlier bibliography.

46 Fumaroli (1996) 157–8.    47 Donati (1633) 179.
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212 What Was Tragedy?

melancholy, despair, cruel diseases, and sometimes death itself.”48 Diet, exercise,
or purgation could “temper” one’s “complexion,” or strike the right balance
among one’s humors. A cure, therefore, was not a one-time remedy for illness
but a routine care of the self. What’s more, because we all start out with unique
humoral dispositions and are exposed to various airs, waters, and winds, we each
must minister to ourselves. “Our owne experience is the best Physitian,” writes
Burton. “That diet which is most propitious to one, is often pernitious to another;
such is the variety of palats, humors, and temperatures, let every man observe,
and be a law unto himself.”49 If the body requires a care of the self that is at once
regular and suited to the person, so too does the soul. The language of healing
and purgation appears regularly, for example in Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation
of Christ (De Imitatione Christi), a spiritual guide highly esteemed by the Jesuits:
“Visit me often, therefore, and teach me Your holy discipline. Free me from evil
passions and cleanse my heart of all disorderly affections [sana cor meum ab
omnibus affectionibus inordinatis] so that, healed and purged within [intus sana-
tus et bene purgatus], I may be fit to love, strong to suffer [patiendum], and firm
to persevere” (3.5).50 In the Holy Court (La Cour sainte), the Jesuit Nicolas
Caussin, himself an author of tragedies, likewise says that while Nicholas
­
­Coffeteau may have been content to paint the passions in his 1626 Picture of
Human Passions (Le Tableau des affections humaines), he himself aims to “shew their
remedies” and to “cure” them.51 This is part of the Ignatian ethic of cura persona-
lis, or care of the person.
If we bear in mind the inter-involvement of medical and spiritual discourse and
then recall Burton’s dictum that “our owne experience is the best Physitian,” it may
help us to understand why the Jesuits (though by no means only the Jesuits) rou-
tinely gloss Aristotle’s discussion of catharsis by quoting the claims for the theater’s
uses made by the comic poet Timocles in his Women in the Dionysia and preserved
for posterity by Athenaeus in The Deipnosophists. “Man is a creature born to labour,
and many are the distresses which his life carries with it,” he says:
Therefore he has contrived these respites from his cares; for his mind, taking on for-
getfulness of its own burdens, and absorbed in another’s woe, departs in joy, instructed
[paidethe≠|] withal. . . . The poor man, for instance, learns that Telephus was more
beggarly than himself, and from that time on he bears his poverty more easily. The sick
man sees Alcmeon raving in madness. . . . One has lost his son in death—Niobe is a
comfort. One is lame—he sees Philoctetes. . . . For he is reminded that all his calam-
ities, which are “greater than mortal man has ever borne,” have happened to others,
and so he bears his own trials more easily. (6.1.223b–d)52
Athenaeus’ modern editor Charles Burton Gulick warns that Timocles’ theory of
tragedy “should be contrasted with that of his contemporary Aristotle.”53 But early

48 Burton (1989 [1632]) 2: 250.    49 Burton (1989 [1632]) 2: 27.

50 Thomas à Kempis (1751) 82.
51 Caussin (1678) 528. On Caussin’s tragedies, see Hocking (1943) and Chevalier (2008), (2012),
and (2013b) 431–4, 437–40.
52 Athenaeus (1927–41), trans. Gulick.    53 Athenaeus (1927–41) 3: 5, n. f.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 213

moderns who conceived of catharsis as a regime of care and exercise could perceive
two points of contact: that vicarious experience could train and inure us, making
us strong to suffer and firm to persevere, and that each man could find in the tragic
theater a diet suited to his humoral disposition and life circumstances. This is pre-
sumably one of the reasons that the index to the only official collection of Jesuit
tragedies promulgated by the order lists passions occasioned by specific circum-
stances. These textual “places” might be useful models for students of rhetoric to
imitate, but they also suggest that the collection could be read selectively as a
manual of spiritual instruction and consolation.54
As should be clear by now, when Bruna Filippi claims that the “objective of
Jesuit tragedy” was not purgation but edification, she erects a distinction that the
Jesuits were at pains to deny.55 In their poetics, Galluzzi and Donati everywhere
assume that the poet must imprint deep passions in his soul as he dramatizes a
mortal action full of pain whose performance will produce a response of fear, pity,
and wonder. The monstrous things that come on stage inspire fear, says Donati,
producing a series of quotations like that of Seneca’s Oedipus: “With dread am
I shaken, fearing the trend of fate, and my fluttering heart wavers betwixt two
moods [Horrore quatior, fata quo vergant timens, / trepidumque gemino pectus
affectu labat]” (Oedipus ll. 206–7).56 But because he believes that the passions
cannot be imitated without reference to a moral psychology, he includes a mini-
ature treatise on the subject in his Art of Poetry. After surveying previous accounts
of the passions in Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, and Aquinas, he discusses the pecu-
liar qualities and expressions of each passion in turn, much as Aquinas does in the
Summa theologiae and as Descartes, who was himself educated at the Jesuit college
of La Flèche in Anjou, would do twenty years later in his Passions of the Soul (1649).
Not content to produce a catalogue, Donati explains how the passions can be
mapped onto Aristotle’s discussion of action (praxis), manners (ēthos), and senti-
ments (dianoia) in the Poetics. The passions depend on a cogitative power, he says,
for the persons of a drama must recognize what is before them and form a judg-
ment about whether it promises good or ill before they can feel hope, fear, or any
other passion in their sensitive appetite. Their desires and passions, which fall
under dianoia, reveal their judgments. But as creatures with free will, they retain
the power to drive toward or to flee objects regardless of the dictates of their sensi-
tive appetite. The choices that they make reveal the disposition of their will to vice
or virtue.57 For Donati, catharsis is a form of training in which pity, fear, and
wonder are exercised, aligned with their rightful objects, returned to a just measure,

54 See the index to vol. 1 of Selectae (1634). The entries in the index are: paternal affection, delib-
eration, anger, insane love, tranquility of soul, sorrow, fury, the grief of a father for his dead son,
shame, fear of the Lord, and true tranquility, neither hoping nor fearing. The Latin entries are affectus
paterni, affectus deliberantis, affectus irae, amoris insani, animi tranquillitas, dolentis, furoris, patris dolen-
tis mortem filii, pudor, timor domini, and tranquillitatis vera, nihil sperare, nihil timere.
55 Filippi (2006) 519.
56 Donati (1633) 206; all translations of Seneca in this chapter are taken from Seneca (1917),
trans. Miller.
57 Donati (1633) esp. 166–7, 175–7.
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214 What Was Tragedy?

and disposed to serve a rectified will. By turning to Crispus now, we can see how
a model Jesuit tragedy pursues that end.

Crispus; or the Unfortunate Innocent

Before Stefonio took up his pen, the most ambitious theatrical production that
the Collegio Romano had mounted was Stefano Tucci’s 1573 Christ the Judge
(Christus judex).58 The signal achievement of Stefonio, who directed Tucci’s play,
was to recast this tradition of sacred representation in a form suggested by the
examples of Euripides and Seneca, authors who were achieving new salience in the
Jesuit curriculum with the promulgation of the Plan of Studies (Ratio Studiorum,
1586, 1591, 1599) and the publication of Martin Delrio’s edition of all the r­ emains
of Latin tragedy, Syntagma tragoedia latinae (1593–95). Delrio was an immensely
learned Jesuit and a friend of the humanist Justus Lipsius. His formidable edition
maintained three points that were not widely accepted in his day: that Seneca
the philosopher and Seneca the tragedian were one; that, with the exception of
Octavia, the Senecan corpus was a unified production; and that Seneca’s moral
philosophy should be used to gloss the plays.59 By noting when Stoic doctrine
clashed with Christian dogma, it not only made Seneca “safe” for the classroom,
it suggested how counter-reformation dramatists could revise Seneca. At the
Collegio Romano, students would have encountered Delrio in their final year of lit-
erary studies, when their professor could assign tragedies by Sophocles, Euripides,
and Seneca.60
Stefonio responded to the stimulus of Delrio’s edition and his duties as professor
of rhetoric by writing three original tragedies: Santa Symphorosa (1593), which
dramatizes the martyrdom of a Christian widow and her sons under the emperor
Hadrian; Crispus (1597); and Flavia (1600), which represents the martyrdom of
three Christian members of the imperial family during the reign of Domitian.61
All three were produced for decades in Jesuit colleges, but Crispus became syn-
onymous with Jesuit tragedy. It was reprinted, criticized, defended, anthologized,
translated, and rewritten, becoming (in Tristan L’Hermite’s French version) a staple
of Molière’s acting troupe and (in the much-changed form of an opera libretto)
a vehicle for the great castrato Senesino.62 To Galluzzi and Donati, it was what

58 On Tucci, see Soldati (1908); Quarta (1995) 123–34; and Tucci (2011).
59 On the edition, see Dréano (1936); Roland Mayer (1994) 159–67; Machielsen (2015) 137–203.
See A. W. Schlegel (1846) 210 for his doubts about the identity of the tragedian and the philosopher. For
a recent reconsideration of connections between the philosophy and the tragedies, see Fischer (2014).
60 See Fois (1995). Other authors assigned in the literary curriculum might include the poets
Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Pindar, and Horace, the historians Thucydides, Julius Caesar,
Sallust, and Tacitus, and the orators Demosthenes, Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian.
61 On Santa Symphorosa, see Quarta (1994) 148–50; on Flavia, see Quarta (1994) 153–4; Fumaroli
(1996) 138–70; Chevalier (2014a) 77­­–80; Hoxby (forthcoming).
62 Cripsus was printed in Rome (1601 [or 1602]), Leiden (1604, 1609), Naples (1604), Antwerp
(1608, 1639), Lyon (1609), Rouen (1610), and Florence (1647, 1687). It was included in Selectae
(1634); translated into Italian verse (with significant changes) by Joseph Caroprese (Naples, 1615);
adapted for the French stage by François de Grenaille as L’Innocent malheureux (1639) and by
Tristan l’Hermite as La Mort de Chrispe ou les malheurs du grand Constantin (1645); and rewritten in
Italian by J. B. Philippe Ghirardelli as Constantino (1653). On its transmission to France, see Tristan
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 215

Oedipus the Tyrant was to Aristotle: a summit of artistic achievement and the
­example that should give the rule. When Pallavicino reckoned up the cultural
contributions of the Jesuits in his polemical vindication of the order (1649), he
cited Stefonio as their premier dramatist. Crispus, he said, had brought tragedy to
Rome and “won applause from all nations,” where it was “often performed and
still more often read,” though only those who had seen it performed could admire
it adequately.63
In the annals of Philostorgius, Zosimus, and Zonaras, Stefonio found an
­incident that bore an uncanny resemblance to the stories of Joseph (Genesis 39)
and Hippolytus, both of whom were falsely accused of rape after refusing the
improper advances of women. The subject was suitable for the Collegio Romano’s
Ludi parthenici, for the purpose of these entertainments, which were dedicated to
the Virgin Mary (Fig. 5.1), was to divert students away from the lewd perform-
ances staged by itinerant troupes of professional actors during Carnival. As a
Christian devoted to the Virgin Mary, Crispus could affirm the virtues of modesty
and chastity.64
The historical Crispus was the first-born son of Constantine and Minervina.
Even after Constantine married Fausta, daughter of Maximian and sister of
­Maxentius, he continued to favor his son from his prior relationship, entrusting
his education to the learned Christian Lactantius. When Constantine and his
co-emperor Licinius declared three new Caesars in ad 313, Crispus and his younger
half-brother Constantine Minor were among them. As commander of Gaul, he
won victories against the Franks and the Alamani in ad 318, 320, and 322, then
secured Constantine’s position as sole emperor by winning brilliant naval and land
victories against a now hostile Licinius. Yet in ad 326, the emperor had his son
tried and executed. The explanation offered by Stefonio’s sources was that Fausta,
who was anxious for the advancement of her own children, tried unsuccessfully
to entrap Crispus in a liaison. When she then accused him of rape, Constantine
revenged himself, either poisoning his son secretly or (as Stefonio prefers) trying
him quietly in court. After discovering the deception, he also had his wife suffo-
cated. As Caussin observes in The Holy Court, “Verily, this death, which way soever
we look, is most lamentable. The Tragedies that bemoan it with so much ornament,
as that of our Stephonius, have much spirit in them: but taking only the thing in the
simple nakedness of the fact, it ministreth matter of compassion to hearts most
obdurate.”65 Indeed, Edward Gibbon’s narrative of the affair in The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire is filled with pathos, disbelief, and censure.66
Because Crispus has only recently been edited and has never been translated
into English, I have quoted and translated a few long excerpts in an appendix that

l’Hermite (2001) and Forestier (2002). For the opera (which was performed in Rome and London),
see Crispo: drama. Da rappresentarsi nel Regio Teatro d’Hay-Market, per La Reale Accademia di Musica
(London, 1721).
63 Pallavicino (1649) 118.
64 On the Jesuit hostility to profane theater, see Zampelli (2006). On the occasion, see Fumaroli
(1996) 143–5.
65 Caussin (1678) 246.    66 Gibbon (1994 [1776–88]) 1: 437–43, 647–53.
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216 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 5.1. The front matter of Crispus advertising its performance during games dedicated
to the Virgin Mary. Bernardino Stefonio, Crispvs: tragoedia Bernardini Stephonii Sabini
presbyteri e Societate Iesv. Rome: Carolum Vulliettum, 1601.
Houghton Library, Harvard University IC6 St322 601c.

follows this chapter. The tragedy opens with a prologue modeled on Seneca’s Thy-
estes, in which the shade of Tantalus is raised from the dead and urged by a Fury
to goad his house to madness (ll. 1–121).67 In Crispus, Phaedra fills the role of
Tantalus, while an evil demon, who seems to foresee that the emperor Constantine
will extend the reign of Christ, urges her to stoke the fires of the empress Fausta’s
lust for her stepson, thus visiting the same sorrow on the house of the emperor that
she once brought upon the house of Theseus. Phaedra resists, but by a combination
of threats and the admonition to examine her own breast, “Phaedra is brought to

67 All references are to Stefonio (2007 [1597]), ed. Torino.

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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 217

be Phaedra [Phaedrae admovetur Phaedra]” (1.209). She then transmits her lust by
thrusting a burning brand into the breast of Fausta, provoking an ecstatic prophecy
of doom from the demon (app. excerpt 1). In a Senecan universe characterized by
cyclical violence and hereditary crime, it seems natural that Tantalus should infuse
his spirit into his descendants. But Phaedra’s only ties to Fausta are their literary
and moral resemblance. The transmission is cultural and ethical, enacting a trans-
lation of empire and letters from ancient Greece to Rome and thence to the
Collegio Romano. This prologue was reportedly watched with awe at a subsequent
Neapolitan production of 1603, but a few critics objected that the dead should not
return to earth in a Christian play. In his Defense, Galluzzi produces apparitions of
the dead from the Bible, the early church fathers, the venerable Bede, and Christian
mystics, not to mention Greeks, Romans, Chaldeans, Cabbalists, and Rabbis. Any
belief that is so universal, he says, is poetically verisimilar, even if it is not philo-
sophically probable. Besides, poets and orators personify abstract virtues, vices, or
passions of the soul all the time. Therefore, we should consider Phaedra an embodi-
ment of the force and violence of amorous passion, not the woman of Athens but
a simulacrum and example introduced through demonic influence into the imagin-
ation of Fausta, already hard-pressed with love for Crispus. For behind a crime so
repugnant to nature and reason must lie a diabolical instigation.68
Although the first performance of Crispus was by all accounts a great success, we
know few details of its staging. We have relatively full descriptions of a production
that Stefonio directed in Naples in 1603, however.69 If we can judge from accounts
of the Jesuit stage in the early seventeenth century, the play was probably per-
formed on a raked platform whose sides tapered as they receded from the view,
forcing the perspective.70 Quadrilateral periaktoi may have occupied the front cor-
ners of the stage, reinforcing the impression of depth and permitting the scene
to change when turned. We do know from Stefonio himself that the “beautiful
design” for a Vitruvian tragic scene “made on a panel” depicted “palazzi, paintings,
sculptures, colonnades, balustrades, temples, streets, lines and lengths of wall,
spires, columns, temples, and balconies, just as they were in ancient Rome at that
part of the Via Sacra that runs from the Capitoline to the Lateran, traversing the
Carinae, the most noble of ancient streets.”71 As was the practice in later Roman
theater, the chorus appeared on stage, not in an orchestra, and all the actors, who
were supplied with historically accurate costumes and standards based on Lipsius’
learned treatise of 1596, On the Roman Army (De militia Romana libri quinque,
commentarius ad Polybium) (Figs. 5.2, 5.3), were coached to move in appropriate
military formations.
The dialogue of Act 1 would only have reinforced the overwhelming impression
of romanitas made by the setting and stage movement, for it is dominated by a long
narrative of Crispus’ victories in Germany that enters into the fine points of Roman

68 Galluzzi (1633) 126–36.    69 Galluzzi (1633) 83.

70 Sarbiewski (1954) 231–2; Mamczarz (1995) 349–61.
71 Many details of the Neapolitan production of 1603, including this one, are documented in a
collection of thirty-two letters written by Stefonio to Valentino Mangioni and preserved at the Vatican
(A.R.S.I., Epp. NN. 80), qt. fol. 12. Fumaroli (1996) 152 uses these.
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218 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 5.2. The Neapolitan performance of Crispus staged in 1603 and directed by Bernardino
Stefonio himself featured costumes whose details were based on Justus Lipsius’ learned treatise,
On the Roman Army (1596).
Houghton Library, Harvard University NC5.L6698.596d, p. 271.

encampments, formations, and maneuvers. The narrative was probably intended

to reinforce the students’ study of Roman military history and strategy as it is
preserved in works such as Vegetius’ Epitome of Military Matters (Epitoma Rei Mili-
taris). But it also presents an ideologically driven vision of empire’s potential to
serve the mission of the Church. Crispus is guided by St. Augustine’s chief cri-
terion for establishing whether an offensive war is just: that violence be used to
pursue the promise of eternal peace on earth (illud in primis putans / regale semper,
viribus regni suis / stabilire terris pacis aeternae fidem; Crispus 1.371–3). In an effort
to give dramatic expression to this apparent paradox (which leads Aquinas to treat
just war under the heading of charity), Crispus is characterized as at once savage
and gentle (ferocem expertus et mitem manum; Crispus 1.365), “gentle in terror,
comely in his holy bloom [terrore blandus, flore divino decens]” (1.498), “ferocious
in arms, and lovely of face [ferox / armis, decorus ore]” (1.589–90), and he relies
as much on his eloquent speech (which flows like the Po swollen with melting
snows) as he does on the force of his arms (1.502–9). Although he slays the opposing
general in single-handed combat amid general slaughter, he conquers the minds of
his enemies by returning the corpse with honor, thus demonstrating that faith can
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 219

Fig. 5.3. Costumes were based on Justus Lipsius, On the Roman Army (1596).
Houghton ­Library, Harvard University NC5.L6698.596d, p. 146.

disarm savage fury (1.712–13). The senate awards him a triumph not for his
­victory but his virtue (Triumphi decora virtuti paras; 1.741). If we hear a call to
reclaim the lost territories of the Holy Roman Empire in the narrative of Crispus’
conquests, we should remember that the Jesuits believed that the best chance
of countering the Reformation lay in conceding the independence of civil rulers
in secular matters while trying to retain a position of spiritual leadership for the
Pope over a society of Christian states. This would explain why the ode that con-
cludes Act 1 should revert to the time of St. Paul, when the apostle, strong in word,
taught Christians to wage war on Nero, hence helping to establish with the blood
of martyrs a distinction (unknown in pagan jurisprudence) between temporal and
spiritual spheres.72
In Acts 2 through 4, the locus shifts from the empire to the palace and from the
public arena to the arcana of the heart. First, a naive old man describes Fausta’s love
for her stepson in wondering terms of admiration that raise the suspicions of the
chorus because her adoration of his statue shows all the hallmarks of an Ovidian
erotic obsession. Next the eunuch compares her to a mad Bacchante. Then a mes-
senger recounts in the presence of the emperor all the physical manifestations of
her madness. The difficulty of understanding women is a theme of the play. “Rarely
is human nature examined properly, a woman’s never. Woman has doubtful inroads,

72 On the Jesuits’ theories of just war, the relationship of temporal to spiritual power, and similar
topics, see Costello (1974) and Höpfl (2004).
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220 What Was Tragedy?

impenetrable returns, nothing certain,” say the chorus [Humana raro ingenia
spectantur probe, / muliebre nunquam. Foemina ingressus habet / dubios, regres-
sus invios, certum nihil] (2.48–50). That we are confined to seeing the surface
manifestations of Fausta’s passion is underlined by the chorus: “Just as the tides
agitate the sea, pain, pleasure, joy, grief, fear, and hope agitate the mind in turn.
But you see the cause of the water’s agitation. The cause of a seething mind cannot
be detected [Dolor, voluptas, gaudium, moeror, timor / et spes, ut aestus aequor,
alternum ciet / animum: sed aestus aequoris causam vides, / animi aestuantis causa
deprendi nequit]” (2.58–61). There is a simple reason why Fausta never appears
on stage, speaking only four lines from behind the scene: at the time Crispus was
composed, the Jesuits were rigidly enforcing their ban on actresses and cross-dressed
boys. When we consider how poets writing for troupes with actresses dramatized
the same fable, it becomes obvious how irksome the rule must have been: Tristan
l’Hermite gives Fausta an opening monologue, a monologue in stanze, and con-
frontations with Crispus that mark the dramatic high-points of his play. But
by describing Fausta’s descent to the languid stage of love, Stefonio satisfies the
requirements of verisimilitude, at least according to Galluzzi, by making her too
debilitated to appear in public.73 And by contrasting our limited view of Fausta’s
passion with our privileged access to the thoughts of Crispus and Constantine, he
manages to thematize not only the inscrutability of others’ hearts but the vagaries
of our own.
In Act 3, we encounter Crispus, who has never fled the enemy, fleeing Fausta
and Rome. According to Donati’s explanation of the relationship between action,
will, and passion in his Art of Poetry, Crispus’ reaction of horror and fear reveal his
judgment of her proposition, while his flight, as a stage action, makes the oper-
ation of his will visible.74 Echoing Hippolytus’ anguished response to Phaedra
in lines 671–86 of Seneca’s Hippolytus (or Phaedra, as we now prefer to title it),
Crispus invokes the great ruler of the sky, asking when he will ever hurl his light-
ning if not now, then calls punishment down upon himself as noxious: After all, he
has pleased his stepmother (3.23–8). Fausta’s eunuch then concludes that one
crime must be covered by another and that blame must be transferred to the inno-
cent. Armed with the sword that Crispus has dropped in horror, his mistress plays
her part to perfection. A herald enters in Act 4 to reveal the fall of Crispus (4.10).
He describes how Constantine Minor told the emperor of trouble at home. There
Constantine found Fausta, disarranged and begging to end her life as Lucretia had.
Struck with horror, he told Fausta to live as an example to the age and sent for
Crispus. The second scene reveals Constantine alone asking where Crispus is
leading him against his will (4.107). In a long pathetic and deliberative mono-
logue, he feels himself torn between the impulse to exact bloody penalties and his
resurgent love (app. excerpt 2).
When Crispus answers his father’s call to return home, he knows he is likely to
be executed unjustly. But in a passage that may have inspired Racine to impute the

73 Galluzzi (1633) 138–48.    74 Donati (1633) 166–71.

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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 221

same motive for silence to Hippolyte in Phèdre, he determines neither to shame

his father in public nor to be the occasion of a civil war:75
I will yield to the madness, yield to the time. The crime which I will seem to have
done, I will undeservedly atone for, blameless and innocent, on trial for another’s
crime. I prefer to seem base than disrespectful to my father. Let anything follow;
weapons will never protect me. My salvation must not be cut out by force.
cedam furori, tempori cedam; scelus,
fecisse quod videbor, indigne luam
integer et insons, sceleris alieni reus.
Turpis videri malo, quam patri impius.
Quidvis sequatur, arma me nunquam tegent:
non experimenda viribus nostra est salus. (4.392–7)
Crispus’ use of the word salus, which may mean health, safety, or Christian salvation
is typical of the play’s use of Latin to establish a system of pagan values, only to
over-write it with Christian ones. Another instance is Crispus’ declaration, “my
death is a play [ludus exitium est meum]” (4.481), for the word ludus may mean
anything from a theatrical entertainment to a gladiatorial combat or a Christian
martyrdom.
A meta-theatrical dimension of Crispus constantly asks us to reflect on the ways
theater can be applied to life. To be sure, the play acknowledges the difficulty of
making just applications. If Constantine would only take the time to reflect on his
son’s manners, he would realize with Ablavius that “not every breast can produce
every fault; rarely do good natures degenerate into disgraces [Non omne pectus
omnis est culpae ferax. / In tanto raro probra degenerant bona / ingenia]” (4.577–
9). Instead, he jumps to the conclusion that he is caught in Thyestes, a tragedy of
sexual transgression and violent revenge (4.188–90). Even when, like Medea, he
feels his heart struck with horror at the thought of killing his child (cor pepulit
horror; Crispus 5.237; Medea l. 926), he fails in his duty to undertake a discern-
ment of spirits:
This is what that swelling in my heart was arguing, this my agitation, this my fore-
boding, this my wavering fear; this the blind tempest of my spirit reported, the death
of an innocent general, and a father’s crime. My foreboding mind was shuddering at
the deception of a stepmother, the grief of nations, its own hidden crime.
Hoc est quod ille cordis agitabat tumor,
hoc aestus, hoc praesagia, hoc anceps pavor;
animi hoc ferebat caeca tempestas mei,
ducis immerentis funus et patris nefas.
Fraudes novercae, gentium luctus, suum
praesaga mens horrebat occultum scelus. (5.540–5)

75 “Should I have exposed the opprobrium of his bed to the light of day? Was I, with a tale all too
honest, to cover my father’s forehead with a blush of shame? [Ai-je dû mettre au jour l’opprobre de son
lit? / Devais-je, en lui faisant un récit trop sincère, / D’une indigne rougeur couvrir le front d’un
Père?]” (Phèdre et Hippolyte ll. 1340–2 in Racine [1989]).
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222 What Was Tragedy?

By the time Constantine realizes he has surpassed the folly of Theseus in Hippolytus
(5.603–5), it is too late. But Crispus sets a better example. He understands that
his stepmother has played the role of Phaedra and that his father is likely to prove
himself a Theseus (4.373–4), but he determines to play the role of the innocent
victim faithfully if his efforts to avert the catastrophe—such as sending for his
grandmother St. Helena to plead his cause—come to nought.
Nevertheless, his predicament leaves him feeling so storm-tossed that he resorts
to describing his inner turmoil in terms suggested by the description of a real storm
at sea in Seneca’s Agamemnon (ll. 465 ff.; app. excerpt 3). Although he tries to master
his fear, it becomes increasingly unclear whether the anger and the up-swelling
force that he ascribes to the storm refer to his disordered psyche, to his father’s ire,
or to his turbulent political situation. Eventually, he arrives at a nadir: “Reason
suggests nothing, since it yields to utter evils, and custom dares nothing [Nil ratio
summis suggerit cedens malis, / nil usus audet]” (4.478–9). “The most able man,
considering what he is, cannot be entirely reliant on himself because of the incap-
acity and weakness of human nature,” says Caussin, “and for this reason he must
avow that if he has a certain hardihood, it comes to him from on high.”76 Even
though we never see his prayer answered, we must infer that Crispus’ hardiness
arrives from the Virgin Mary, whose attributes he catalogues at length in an effort
to sublimate the turmoil of the storm, professing himself ready to endure great
things, however bad, provided she will furnish her strength (app. excerpt 4). Crispus
eventually achieves a state of resignation that brings a spiritual transfiguration in
its wake:
Surrender, valor, renounce your kingdom together with your life. Let us die. This is
the course of a strong man, this the course of a man complying with the decree of his
father and something which reveals the character of a great and pious man according
to the authority of Christ, by whose example, Crispus, you, as a defendant, will remain
silent about your case. Let the life which you owe to your father be returned to him.
Pay him the only gift you can. In gratitude give thanks to him, the only one for whom
you have something thankful to give. And, Crispus, if you piously give your life to
one, you give it to two, both father and God.
Succumbe virtus, regna cum vita abdica.
Moriamur. Hoc est fortis et iussu patris
hoc obsequentis et, quod est magni ac pii,
authore Christo cuius exemplo reus
causam tacebis, Crispe: quam debes patri,
reddatur ipsi vita. Quod solum potes
repende munus, gratiam gratus refer
cui habes et uni, Crispe, si vitam pie
reddis, duobus reddis et patri et Deo. (5.189–97)
Crispus assents to suffer a savage death because he perceives God’s will ordering his
life toward that terminus. The assurance that comes with this convergence of free
will and providence reveals itself in his steadfast death:

76 Caussin (1664) 1: 131.

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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 223

But the young man held still, sure in mind and in expression. Nor did he have that
cold terror while dying, nor that paleness which is common, but rejoicing and sublime
and full of hope, beauty shone out, having overflowed from his inmost mind, much
as the brief gleaming of uncertain light shines below a purple cloud as the sun is
setting.
At iuvenis animo certus et vultu stetit
nec gelidus horror ille morienti fuit,
non ille pallor, esse qui vulgo solet,
sed laetus et sublimis et plenus spei
animo refusus intimo effulsit decor,
qualis cadente sole purpurea nitor
sub nube fulget lucis incertae brevis. (5.622–8)
Tinged with an elegiac sense of loss but charged with exaltation, transport, and
vehemence, this sublime description is set against the despair of the father as he leans
over the corpse of his son, cataloguing its features in a grizzly blazon (app. excerpt 5)
before concluding, “Look, feed on the sight, feed on it, cruel father. Do you see
this work of your blood-stained hand? [En pasce visus, pasce, crudelis pater, / opus
hoc cruentae dexterae cernis tuae?]” (5.689–90). In his 1660 Discourse of Tragedy
(Discours de la tragédie), Corneille uses this scene to underline how effective killings
done in full knowledge of the victim’s identity can be. Thinking to improve Crispus
by following the Poetics too slavishly, says Corneille, Jean-Baptista Ghirardelli made
Crispus’ identity unknown to his father, but in doing so, he robbed Constantine
of the “pains, the confusion, the irresolutions, and the griefs” of a father pro-
nouncing sentence on his own son: “The injustice of his preoccupation would have
been more sensible to Crispus on the part of a father than on the part of a master;
and the quality of the son, augmenting the grandeur of the crime which had been
imposed on him, would at the same time have augmented the grief of seeing a
father persuaded. Even Fausta would have had more internal struggle in under-
taking an incest than in resolving on an adultery.” Stefonio’s handling is superior
because it exploits the theatrical power of deeds knowingly undertaken.77
So devastating is the sense of tragic waste in Stefonio’s tragedy that the chorus
can utter only inarticulate ululations in the final act, and even Constantine can
manage no more than a cascade of grief-stricken exclamations that comes to a
­conclusion with the final words of the tragedy, “O my crime [o crimen meum]”
(5.754; app. excerpt 6). Because the play is filled with vivid images of crime’s
consequences—Phaedra must perpetually revolve in her soul what she did only
once (1.24), and a senator says that whoever commits a crime is condemned to
serve as defendant, informer, torturer, and judge in the courtroom of his own mind
(3.287–97)—we sense that even if Constantine is the ruler of the world, he will be
arraigned before his own conscience. Perhaps we are intended to reflect on the
claim—made by the hostile, pagan historian Zosimus—that Constantine only
sought Christian baptism and only converted the Empire because no pagan priest
would exonerate him from imbruing his hand in the blood of his son. If so,

77 Corneille (1984) 1: 74.

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224 What Was Tragedy?

Crispus’ death may have served a providential purpose. But the play itself offers
us no such consolation.
Stefonio’s style struck some of his contemporaries as too dependent on Seneca’s.78
In defense of his master, Galluzzi appeals to the discussion of Virgil’s reuse of verse
in Macrobius’ Saturnalia, a wide-ranging dialogue written in the fifth century ad
in which Rufius Albinus argues that the recycling of language is a form of emula-
tion in which Greek and Roman authors have always engaged, that Virgil has
thereby preserved the ruins of an ancient literary tradition that would otherwise
have perished entirely, and that when we encounter another’s words in his text,
we prefer to think them his or marvel at their improvement in their new setting
(6.2, 6.6). Rufius then produces a catalogue of Virgilian borrowings ranging from
half lines to entire passages, a catalogue that seems to put in perspective Stefonio’s
borrowings from a Roman poet who is himself intensely learned and allusive, even
“palimpsestic.”79 Our imitation of an author should result, says Galluzzi, in our
acquiring his “air and a certain inexpressible grace [fattezza], called by Quintilian
the gate of his speech [incessus orationis].”80 Stefonio’s Senecan carriage reveals itself
in a sustained tension between sententious brevity and rhetorical abundance,
between claustrophobic interior monologues and sublime cosmic prospects.
But we are, nevertheless, conscious that he is arranging fragments to form a
­mosaic. When the eunuch raises the alarm, accusing Crispus of rape and pointing
to his cloak and sword as tokens of his crime (3.77–90), he fills the role of the
nurse in Seneca’s Hippolytus (ll. 725–33); while, as a self-made man who must rely
on his valor not his ancestry (3.340–61), he speaks like Lycus, the usurper of
Hercules Furens (ll. 332–57). Ablavius is quick to see through deceit like Ulysses
(Crispus 5.379–81; Troades ll. 568–70); while Constantine, like Theseus, dwells
on the contrast between his son’s demeanor and the crime he is accused of (Crispus
4.70–82; Hippolytus ll. 915–25). The Thyestes and Phoenissae cast a shadow of
sibling rivalry, civil war, and tyranny over the play. For example, a Senator and
Constantine Minor fall into a pointed exchange on popular opinion and sover-
eignty (3.212–43; cf. Thyestes ll. 204–18), and even though Constantine Minor
stops short of the retort that the Senecan subtext offers him—“Whate’er is
wrong to do unto a brother is right to do unto him [Fas est in illo quidquid in
fratre est nefas]” (Thyestes l. 220)—it is difficult not to sense his potential to
become like Atreus.
Yet Crispus more often invokes its Senecan models in order to differentiate itself
from them. Hippolytus’ devotion to the hunt displaces the aggression he feels
against women while deferring his assumption of the responsibilities of marriage,
civil life, and war.81 Crispus, in contrast, has already led legions around the globe
78 Galluzzi (1633) 92.
79 Macrobius (2011), trans. Kaster. On Seneca’s “palimpsestic” style, see A. J. Boyle (1997) ch. 5;
Albrecht (2014) 741–4.
80 Galluzzi (1633) 102–7, qts. on 102, 105.
81 Euripides’ Hippolytus is a youthful devotee of Artemis who declares his wish to “end life’s race
even as I began it [såko| dç jlwail$ Árpeq òqnlgm b¨ot]” (l. 87). His eventual outburst to Zeus,
asking why the god does not permit men to buy their children at temples rather than be forced to live
with women (ll. 616–24), suggests that he has a pathological aversion to passing the threshold of
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 225

(1.355–84), and he shows no pathological aversion to women as a sex. The tragedy

of Crispus is not that he is unready to assume the responsibilities of his father—as
the messenger’s comparison of the dead boy to Phaëton might suggest in Seneca’s
Hippolytus (ll. 1090–1)—but that the empire is needlessly deprived of his direc-
tion. What’s more, whereas Seneca stages a struggle of masculine and feminine
values that can never override each other, Crispus erects an ascending scale against
which both men and women can be measured. As Fausta moves beyond the first
degree of violent love, she sinks down from her creator because the object of her
love is corporal—a point that Galluzzi makes in his Defense, naming Richard of
St. Victor’s On the Four Degrees of Violent Love as one of the literary sources of her
symptoms.82 Rather than invoking the Father and the Son in her distress, she raves
only about the father and the son who are the objects of her erotic obsession
(nomenque patris, nomen et nati vocat; 2.227). Her descent into carnality is con-
summated when Constantine calls her a “whore in matron’s clothing [stolata
meretrix]” (5.556) and declares himself to be a pimp and “butcher [carnifex]”
(5.571–2). Crispus, on the other hand, ascends the same ladder of love by devoting
himself to the Virgin Mary.
One of the features that differentiates Crispus sharply not only from the prac-
tice of eminent Italian tragedians such as Giovan Battista Giraldi but from later
responses to Jesuit dramaturgy such as The Constant Prince and Polyeucte is its use
of a chorus of fifty Roman youths educated and trained by Constantine’s mother,
St. Helena.83 This was the size of Aeschylus’ chorus, says Delrio, before his staging
of the Eumenides caused such fright in the audience that Athens reduced the size of
the chorus by law.84 In keeping with Horace’s advice (Art of Poetry ll. 193–201),
the chorus leader and other individuals sustain the duty of actors; and they all give
counsel to friends; take the part of the blameless; soothe tempers; praise temper-
ance, simplicity, and justice; pray fervently; and sing odes that are occasioned by

sexual maturity. (All translations of Euripides in this chapter are drawn from Euripides [1994–2003],
trans. Kovacs.) Seneca’s Hippolytus is a yet more bloodthirsty hunter whose customs seem to Phaedra’s
nurse to be inappropriate to his time of life (ll. 451–4) and impossible as a general policy (ll. 469–82),
but, by his own account, Hippolytus’ life in the woods is not simply an evasion of sexuality but a rejec-
tion of corrupt civilization, which is characterized by avarice, luxury, sacrifice, court intrigue, tyranny,
slavery, and the fickleness of the mob: Woman is simply the chief instigator and emblem of civilized
evils (ll. 483–564). And yet, as Hippolytus half admits, his antipathy to women may have roots that
lie deeper than reason can tell: “I abominate them all, I dread, shun, curse them all. Be it reason, be it
instinct, be it wild rage: ’tis my joy to hate them all [Detestor omnes, horreo fugio execror. / sit ratio,
sit natura, sit dirus furor, / odisse placuit]” (ll. 566–8). That Hippolytus’ views are in some deep-seated
way a rationalization of a pathology seems to be affirmed, if only symbolically, by the manner of his death:
He is dragged by his frightened horses until his groin is impaled on a charred stump (ll. 1097–1102).
On sexual themes in Seneca’s Hippolytus, see Charles Segal (1986).
82 Galluzzi (1633) 141–4. For an English translation of Richard of St. Victor’s On the Four Degrees
of Violent Love, see Feiss, ed. (2011).
83 Despite understanding that ancient choruses sang and danced, Giraldi suppresses those elem-
ents in his own tragedies, preferring to have only one member of the chorus at a time recite his verses.
His choruses, which punctuate his acts, direct the spectators’ judgment of the events dramatized,
but they do not seek to work upon the emotions of the audiences as a kommos might, nor do they
rely on the effects of the eurythmic energy of dance. See Giraldi (2002 [1554]) 254–6; Corinne
Lucas (1984) 38–9.
84 Delrio (1593–95) 15, citing Marius Victorinus and Julius Pollux as his authorities.
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226 What Was Tragedy?

the action.85 As in Seneca’s mature tragedies, the first and last choral odes frame
the dramatic action in general, philosophical terms, while in their intermediate
odes—which sound fervent notes of desire, fear, and doubt—the chorus appear no
more able than the actors to rise above the action.86
In their final ode, they distinguish their own plane of life from the heroic one on
which Crispus moves:
It satisfies me to stick to the closest shore in my fragile boat. Before the light breezes
can abandon my sails, I will draw them in.
Me juvet fragili rate
proximum littus sequi;
antequam Zephryi leves
lina destituant, legam. (4.627–30)
Then they sound an elegiac note that has the force of prolepsis:
The deceptive glory of the purple flows away like a summer rose; its thorns remain.
Purpurae fallax honor
instar aestivae rosae
defluit: spinae sedent. (4.660–2)
For the Neapolitan production of 1603, these choral odes were accompanied by
elaborately choreographed dances that proved, according to Galluzzi, that move-
ments that were “not only circular but also twisting, entangled, and diverse” could
bring greater delight to audiences than the monotony of a circle.87 Thomas M.
Greene has explored the roots of such maze dances.88 They were thought, as Delrio
and Galluzzi say in their commentaries on tragedy, to reach back through the
Greek chorus to dances that imitated either the windings of the Cretan labyrinth
or the movements of the stars and planets.89 They were also adduced by Robortello
to gloss Aristotle’s claim that all the arts, including dance, were mimetic, imitating
the actions, manners, and passions of men.90 But they were not exclusively Greek.
In book 5 of the Aeneid, Iulus Ascanius concludes the funeral games for Anchises
by leading drills that imitate the windings and unwindings of the Cretan labyrinth,
drills that subsequently became known as the Troiae lusus (5.749–77). Augustus
revived this ancient practice during his reign, and it was henceforth continued
until the end of the Empire.91 In the Aeneid, the elders look on with joy at the
­vitality and skill of the youths because they represent the future of Rome.
The choral dances of Crispus must have been intended to have a similar effect,
for they displayed the grace, agility, and piety of the students at the Jesuit college

85 Galluzzi (1621) 284–7.

86 For a recent account of Seneca’s choruses with earlier bibliography, see Mazzoli (2014). Also see
Davis (1993); J. D. Bishop (1965); and Amoroso, ed. (2006).
87 Galluzzi (1621) 281–2.    88 Greene (2001).
89 Delrio (1593–95) 16; Galluzzi (1621) 280–3.    90 Robortello (1548) 12.
91 On the continuation of the Troiae lusus, see Suetonius, Gaius 18.3 and Claudius 21.3; Tacitus,
Annals 11.11; Dio, Roman History 59.7.4, 59.11.1.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 227

Fig. 5.4. Choreography for the choral dances performed in Acts 1 and 2 of the Neapolitan
production of Crispus staged in 1603. Bernardino Stefonio, Crispus. Naples: T. Longum,
1604.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

in Naples. In the first act, the chorus of Roman youths traced out the double-headed
eagle of imperial Rome (Fig. 5.4). In the second, as they prayed for the longevity
of Crispus, the Senate, and the people of Rome and looked forward to the expan-
sion of the Holy Roman Empire, they formed a caduceus, the symbol of health
(also Fig. 5.4). In the third, their eurythmic energy disbursed in radiating lines in
tribute to Rumor’s celerity (Fig. 5.5). And in the fourth, they performed a maze
dance with a cross at its heart (Fig. 5.6). The allegory of this final dance was complex,
for Orphic, neoplatonic, and Christian traditions insisted on a deep connection
between love as the prime mover of the universe, the orderly dance of the cosmos,
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228 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 5.5. Choreography for the choral dance performed in Act 3 of the Neapolitan produc-
tion of Crispus staged in 1603. Bernardino Stefonio, Crispus. Naples: T. Longum, 1604.
Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

and the rhythmic movements and counter-movements of such labyrinthine dances.

By imitating the movements of the heavens, the dancers could for the moment
become one with the divine, yet, depending on their dramatic context, such dances
could also be used to conjure up the hazardous labyrinth of profane love, with its
dangerous misdirections and fatal carnality. All the principal persons of Crispus are
caught in the labyrinth of love. Crispus never emerges from it. And yet, if he
cannot escape as Theseus did, he does triumph through a filial love and a devotion
to the Virgin that is a manifestation of sacred love: He finds his cross in the maze.
Had Greene known of this dance, he would surely have wished to include it in his
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 229

Fig. 5.6. Choreography for the choral dance performed in Act 4 of the Neapolitan production
of Crispus staged in 1603. Bernardino Stefonio, Crispus. Naples: T. Longum, 1604.
Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

magisterial study of labyrinthine dances instead of confining himself to renaissance

France and England.92
We should not leave Crispus without considering the resonance of Crispus’
removal from the scene, for we must remember that he was voted a triumph for
this day, and that the scene represented the ancient Via Triumphalis. That route
had been reclaimed in 1535 when Pope Paul II cleared the houses and churches
that were cluttering it up so that the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V might make
his entry to the city past the marvels of antiquity.93 More recently, Cardinal Baronio
had furnished a Christian triumph for the relics of Saints Domitilla, Nereus, and
Achilleus, who had originally been buried in the catacombs before being brought

92 Greene (2001) 1403 n. 1. The Neapolitan production of Crispus is not an isolated instance of
labyrinth dances in the Jesuit theater. Other intricate examples may be found in Soggetto d’Ignatio in
Monserrato (Rome, 1623); see Filippi (2001) 100 and (2006) 521.
93 Fiorani (1970) 144–7.
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230 What Was Tragedy?

in 1228 to S. Adriano on the Roman Forum.94 On May 1, 1597, this procession

moved from S. Adriano to the Gesù, where an altar was prepared in front of the
church, and thence to the Capitoline Hill, passing between the Dioscuri and stop-
ping at the statue of Marcus Aurelius. It processed under the arches of Septimius
Severus, Titus, and Constantine, following the Via Sacra to Baronio’s title church
S.S. Nereo ed Achilleo, where temporary honorific arches displayed the trophies of
the martyrs. The procession included all the essential elements of an ancient tri-
umph: “the visit to the Capitol, the march along the Via Sacra, the return to the
house of the triumphators—their church and final resting place.”95 Inscriptions
along the route explained the ideological program of the ceremony. The first
claimed that Domitilla, by legend a Flavian, had cleansed the Capitol of the cult of
daemons. At the Arch of Septimius, the Senate and the People of Rome declared
that the martyrs had brought the peace of Christianity to the Republic and glory
to Rome through their sacrifice. The Arch of Titus observed that if that emperor
had avenged the death of Christ with the destruction of Jerusalem, Domitilla had
avenged it more gloriously by shedding her own blood. The Arch of Constantine
pronounced that, although Roman emperors had celebrated their victories over
subject peoples along the Via Sacra, these martyrs had triumphed over the trium-
phators. Domitilla had brought greater glory to Rome through her renunciation
of life and empire than the Imperial family and the twelve Caesars had by ruling.
A book of poems written for the occasion, chiefly by students at the Collegio
Romano, emphasized the romanitas of the martyrs, the glory that their blood
had brought to Rome, their paradoxical triumph over worldly glory, and their
defeat of paganism. The antiquarian spirit of Baronio’s triumph was not ideologic-
ally innocent: It asserted the continuity between Imperial Rome and the papacy
that Thomas Hobbes described in more jaundiced terms in his 1651 Leviathan,
“And if a man consider the originall of this great Ecclesiastical Dominion, he will
easily perceive, that the Papacy, is no other, than the Ghost of the deceased Romane
­Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”96 This is the spirit in which the
remains of Crispus are removed from the scene: As a relic, but only as a relic, he
triumphs over the triumphators.

The Constant Prince

Calderón de la Barca’s 1629 The Constant Prince (El príncipe constante) proceeds
inexorably to a similar conclusion, when the Portuguese at last reclaim the relics
of Don Fernando of Portugal, the younger brother of Don Enrique, Henry the
Navigator.97 Fernando comes to this end because, as a hostage to the Moors after

94 The chief description of the process is provided in Baronio (1630) May 12, notes, 283ff. My
summary and interpretation relies heavily on Krautheimer (1967). On Baronio’s treatment of Rome
as a sacred landscape, see also Ditchfield (2005) 171–8.
95 Krauthheimer (1967) 176.    96 Hobbes (1651) 386 (ch. 47).
97 All quotations are from Calderón (2000). Translations are mine, but see Calderón (1961) for a
complete one. On its sources, see Sloman (1950); and Küpper (1990) 376–7. For essays questioning
or defending its status as tragedy, see Reichenberger (1960); A. A. Parker (1973); Parr (1980); and
Lumsden-Kouvel (2000) esp. 104–6. For the play’s affinities with auto sacramental, see Wilson and
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 231

an unsuccessful assault on Tangiers, he refuses to be ransomed at the cost of the

Christian city of Ceuta. Asking, “Who am I? Am I more than a man? [¿Quién
soy yo? ¿Soy más que un hombre?]” (l. 1361), he effectively signs his own death
warrant: “Christians, Fernando is dead. Moors, a slave remains with you; captives,
a companion is today added to your sufferings [Cristianos, Fernando es muerto;
/ moros, un esclavo os queda; / cautivos, un compañero / hoy se añade a vuestras
penas]” (ll. 1393–6). When he tears up the article of agreement that would free
him, he sets himself on an inexorable downward journey. Through the accidents
of war, he has fallen from the role of military commander to chivalric knight to
honored captive, but as the careers of the King of Fez and the Moorish com-
mander Muley demonstrate, a man’s fortune can change; now with a deliberate
choice Fernando ensures that his fortune will not recover. He is treated like a
slave, forced to beg and to sleep on a dung hill, and he eventually dies of disease
and starvation. His suffering is self-imposed and patiently endured, and it does
not end with death: The implacable King of Fez, whose irascible passions are
a studied contrast to the prince’s concupiscible ones, orders that his cadaver be
­exposed to mockery (ll. 2640–3). As Alban Forcione observes, this downward
journey takes the prince from the spacious oceans and battlefields of the first
jornada, to the palaces and pleasure gardens of the second, to the stables and
sepulcher of the third—a wondrous journey that depends on the fluid conven-
tions of the Spanish theater, which, like the Globe Theatre, could represent a
coastline in one scene and a dungeon in the next.98 Yet the constant prince’s
descent and confinement are but the preconditions for his apotheosis. For the
Portuguese eventually exchange the captured Fénix, the blooming daughter of
the King of Fez, for his decayed corpse.
The play is filled with presentiments of the future that affect all the principal
persons of the play, creating the impression that they are caught in a great web.99
When the Portuguese expedition first lands to assault Tangiers, Don Enrique con-
fesses that he is filled with fear and senses that la suerte—luck, fortune, fate—is
against him (ll. 517–18). Then when Don Fernando is surrounded by opposing
forces, the King of Fez enjoins him to accept the sentence of la suerte (l. 918).
Fénix is told by an ancient woman that she must become the prize of a corpse
(ll. 1031–40), and whereas she suspects the prophecy to refer to her marriage,
Fernando instantly applies it to himself (ll. 1620–1). He confesses to the princess
in the privacy of her garden that the rigor of the stars causes him to weep (ll. 1682–3).
And yet, Fernando makes his own fate. When Enrique arrives in mourning to
negotiate his release, Fernando reassures him that he desires perpetual servitude
(ll. 1222–3). The uncanny swiftness with which he begins to identify himself as a
corpse (l. 1375) creates the powerful impression that he wills his destiny. He even
rejects an opportunity to escape without consequences to Ceuta, telling Muley,
Entwistle (1939). On its dramatic structure and themes, see Szarota (1967) 123–39; Kayser (1971);
Whitby (1956); Lumsden-Kouvel (1983); and Forcione (2009) 193–200.
98 Forcione (2009) 194.
99 As we shall see later, one of the first to observe this feature of the play was Schulze (1811); also
see Lumsden-Kouvel (2000) 106–9.
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232 What Was Tragedy?

who owes his own life to the prince, that his duty to the King of Fez must take
precedence over the debts of friendship. The king himself repeatedly admonishes
the prince that he is the author of his own suffering. Thus the play asserts provi-
dence without denying moral freedom and preserves scope for choice without
gainsaying eternal necessity.
Yet to focus exclusively on this convergence of free will and providence would
be to underrate the play’s reliance on displays of pathos to achieve its peculiar res-
onance. In its opening scene, Zara commands the Christian prisoners in the
garden to sing their mournful songs for the delectation of the melancholy prin-
cess. While he is still an honored prisoner expecting his release, Fernando says
that he has fallen from the status of a king’s brother to a captive. He fears he may
yet descend the rungs of slavery to lower depths of woe: “One day calls for another,
and so lamentation is chained to lamentation and pain to pain [Un día llama a
otro día, / y así llama y encadena / llanto a llanto y pena a pena]” (ll. 1129–31).
Whereas the fable of a tragedy is often described as a chain of events, the prince
foresees only an endless enchaînement of passive sufferings. Even after his heroic
resolution to remain in captivity, Fernando’s first act is to proclaim a sorrow of
cosmic proportions:
Sea, a wretch swells your waves with weeping; mountains, on you dwells a mournful
man soon to become like your wild beasts; wind, a poor man with his sighs doubles
your extent; earth, a corpse tills you to make his grave in your entrails.
mar, un mísero con llanto
vuestras ondas acrecienta;
montes, un triste os habita
igual ya de vuestras fieras;
viento, un pobre con sus voces
os duplica las esferas;
tierra, un cadáver os labra
en las entrañas su huesa. (ll. 1399–1406)
This is not an isolated performance of grief. When asked to fill two buckets to irrigate
the king’s garden, the prince responds in an extravagant metaphysical aside, “sow-
ing sorrows, cultivating sighs, I will fill them from the current of my eyes [sembrando
penas, cultivando enojos, / llenará en la corriente de mis ojos]” (ll. 1536–7). By the
third jornada, his sufferings can only be reported, not staged. Muley describes how
the poor, infirm man, bereft of all his dignity, has been laid on a dung heap by his
fellow slaves. He presents such a vile spectacle that those who gaze on him shudder
and flee, feeling neither compassion nor regret (ll. 1956–8). If neither pangs of pity
nor tears of sorrow will move the king, he says, then let horror do so (ll. 1981–2).
Yet the structure of the play works against any sense of dramatic impetus because it
presents the suffering prince amid a cast of thematic doubles and foils that changes,
like the background figures in discrete paintings, with each stage of his downward
quest. Because each of these stages has its own coherence and integrity, as Wolfgang
Kayser observes, the play seems to present less an order of events than a musical
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 233

composition with repeated themes.100 Or to put it another way, it suggests how a

fable of tragic suffering appears sub specie aeternitas.
From a more purely human perspective, the divergent affective responses pro-
voked by the degradation of the prince invite us to ask which objects should rightly
provoke horror and which solicit pity. What horrifies the prince is the thought that
Ceuta’s churches might be used as stables or converted to mosques. Is that right?
he asks himself. Perhaps the response of his higher soul overflows into his sensitive
appetite, causing him to feel a horror that is a sign of the intensity of his will. More
likely, he chooses to be affected in order to strengthen his resolve of will:
Here my tongue grows mute with horror, here I grow short of breath, here the anguish
overwhelms me. At the mere thought of it, my heart is cleft, and my hairs stand on
end, and my body trembles.
Aquí enmudece la lengua,
aquí me falta el aliento,
aquí me ahoga la pena:
porque en pensarlo no más
el corazón se me quiebra,
el cabello se me eriza
y todo el cuerpo me tiembla. (ll. 1318–24)
It is as if the prince announces his somatic reactions in order that he may induce
them, developing his passion to a point of plenitude. But the passions that we feel
when confronted by objects do not always accord with our abstract principles: Pious
Muslims flee the cadaverous prince, incapable of compassion. Like Philoctetes, the
prince tests our capacity to feel pity rather than disgust or horror, to acknowledge
a common humanity beneath the filth and despite the stench.
His decline is the more difficult to contemplate because it is an epitome of that
passage from cradle to grave that we must all undertake (ll. 2372–422). Fénix
cannot look upon him when he is nearing death precisely because she knows
she would be looking at a mirror of her own mortality (ll. 2493–4). Yet the prince
himself is not embittered by his decline because, warmed by grace, he can perceive
creation praising God:
But I bless the day for the grace that God imparts to it; for clear it is that every beau-
tiful afterglow and every ray of the sun is a tongue of fire to praise and bless him.
pero yo bendigo el día
por la gracia que nos da
Dios en él; pues claro está
que cada hermoso arrebol,
y cada rayo del sol,
lengua de fuego será
con que le alabo y bendigo. (ll. 2215–21)

100 Kayser (1971).

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234 What Was Tragedy?

Fernando’s serene assent to creation and his gratitude for the warmth of the sun
imparts an exalted quality to his resignation. His inner beatitude is set against the
melancholy discontent of Fénix, who finds no joy in worldly things despite living
for nothing else. Although her garden is a sea of flowers, and the sea a garden
of foamy waves, nothing delights her, neither field, nor sky, nor earth, nor sea
(ll. 95–9). She suffers from that dryness and sadness that beset St. Ignatius before
he began his reasoning on spiritual things.
In the play’s final stage action, the Portuguese ask the Muslims to return the
­remains of their constant prince in exchange for Fénix:
Then send snow for crystals, January for this May, roses for these diamonds, and
­finally, an unhappy corpse for a divine image.
Envía, pues,
la nieve por los cristales,
el enero por los mayos,
las rosas por los diamantes,
y al fin, un muerto infelice
por una divina imagen. (ll. 2736–41)
As Forcione observes, the antithetical motifs that have structured the poetic world
of The Constant Prince are momentarily suspended in “the revealing dissonance of
an ecstatic summation.”101 In the midst of the request, the royal remains cease to
resemble the snow of winter and the chill of January and become roses. In the
play’s timeless dramaturgy, it scarcely matters if they be living or dead. Meanwhile
the living beauty of Fénix is hardened into diamonds and flattened to an icon. In
a final gesture of compensation and reconciliation, the poetry suffuses the relics of
the saint with the transitory glory of creation.

Polyeucte
If The Constant Prince belies Lessing’s claim that the “character of a true Christian,”
with his “gentle pensiveness” and “unchangeable meekness,” is unsuited to the the-
ater and must “war with the whole business of tragedy that is to purge the passions
by the passions,” Corneille’s Polyeucte has long provoked the opposite concern.
Heroic he may be, but is he a good Christian? After all, Clement of Alexandria,
St. Cyprien, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus all enjoined early Christians not to run
to martyrdom, and Origen maintains that only the basest would mock the gods in
the temples of the pagans:
Either because [Celsus] has not heard any Christian or has heard some lawless and
uneducated fellow from the multitude, he says that Christians say, Look, I stand by the
image of Zeus or Apollo or any god indeed, and I blaspheme it and strike it; but it takes no
vengeance on me. He does not notice that in the divine legislation there is the com-
mand, “Thou shalt not speak evil of gods” [Exod. 22: 28], that our mouth may not get
accustomed to speaking evil of any being. For we have heard the command, “Bless and

101 Forcione (2009) 199.

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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 235

curse not” [Rom. 12: 14], and we are taught that “Revilers shall not inherit the
kingdom of God” [1 Cor. 6: 10]. (Contra Celsum 8: 38)102
As if he were the very man identified by Celsus, Polyeucte enjoins his friend to
hasten to disrupt the imperial sacrifice and thus court death and glory: “Let’s go,
my dear Néarque, let’s go before the eyes of men to defy idolatry and show them
who we are [Allons, mon cher Néarque, allons aux yeux des hommes / Braver
l'idolâtrie, et montrer qui nous sommes]” (ll. 645–6; Fig. 5.7).103 “Ostentation,
bravado, self-idolization, all the motifs of heroism are found here conjoined to
celebrate the proud cult of Self,” says Serge Doubrovsky; Corneille’s heroic project
is, “by nature, antichristian. . . . Therefore, if Polyeucte exists in a continuity with the
other theater of Corneille, it is not because that theater was Christian but, on the
contrary, because Polyeucte is not, despite appearances, a Christian work.”104 Of
course, such arguments must surmount a mountain of contradictory biographical
and textual evidence: Corneille commenced his studies at the Jesuit college of
Rouen when he was nine years old, twice winning the college’s prize for Latin
versification; he remained on close terms with the Jesuits throughout his life,
thanking his professor of rhetoric Claude Delidel for teaching him the mysteries
and miracles of grace; he devoted years of his life to translating On the Imitation
of Christ (1656); and he returned to many of its themes in his own Christian Instruc-
tions (1670).105 Polyeucte, as even Doubrovsky admits, displays “all the elements
of Christian dogmatism, mysticism, and propaganda.”106
Its hagiographic source is Symeon Metaphrastes, whose work was revised in the
sixteenth century by Laurentius Surius.107 History records only that during the
reign of the emperor Decius an Armenian destroyed pagan idols in a frenzy; that
his father-in-law tried, by means of threats, persuasions, and the tearful embassy
of his daughter, to make him repent; and that when he refused, he was executed.
Decius was remembered by the Church as a fierce tyrant because his edict requiring
that citizens sacrifice for the health of the empire provoked a crisis of conscience
among Christians, some of whom, including Pope Fabian, suffered martyrdom
rather than comply and in so doing incited mob violence against Christians in
Alexandria and Carthage. But by the time Corneille came to the story, Girolomo
Bartolommei, a dramatist affiliated with the Barberini, had already added “inven-
tions and embellishments of the theater.” Corneille appropriated some of these and
added others. The dream of Pauline, the love of Sévère, the baptism of Polyeucte,

102 Origen (1965), trans. Chadwick. All these authorities are cited in Georges (1996) 193–4.
103 All quotations are from Corneille (1984).
104 Doubrovsky (1963) 244, 255. For other readings that undercut Polyeucte’s Christianity, see
Dort (1957) 57: “Polyeucte invokes God for no other reason than to be his own master.” In Polyeucte,
complains Prigent (1986) 74 (writing from a Jansenist, rather than a secular perspective), the creature
is not made in the image of the creator so much as the reverse: Polyeucte’s God is a metaphysical pro-
jection of heroic psychology, an adequation of the hero himself.
105 On Corneille’s Jesuit education and ties to Delidel, see Couton (1949) 302–4; Fumaroli
(1979); and Triboulet (1985) 773. For interpretations that stress Polyeucte’s Christian themes, see
Calvet (1932); d’Angers (1967); Haley (1960); and Clarke (1992) 235–50.
106 Doubrovsky (1963) 251.
107 Surius’ revised account is printed in Lippeloo (1594–96) 1: 125–31.
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236 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 5.7. Frontispiece of the original edition of Corneille’s Polyeucte (1643). Pierre Corneille
Museum, Rouen.
Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

the sacrifice for the emperor’s victory, Félix’s post as governor, the martyrdom
of Polyeucte’s companion Néarque, the explicitness with which the operations of
grace are treated, and the conversion of Félix and Pauline are all additions to
the historical record.108 As John Cairncross remarks, “in chalking out his plan,
Corneille started with the substantial advantage of having invented almost all the
details. No other tragedy of his owes so little to his sources.”109
In the first two acts, the newly married Pauline, who harbors a tender passion for
Sévère, the Roman hero whom her father forbade her to marry when his fortunes

108 “Abrégé du martyre de Saint Polyeucte” in Corneille (1984) 1.2: 36.

109 Cairncross (1982) 575.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 237

were low, must resist her natural inclination when Sévère, now covered in glory,
arrives to claim her hand. Sévère’s devotion borders on idolatry: “I come to sac-
rifice, but it is to her beauties that I come to immolate all my volitians [Je viens
sacrifier, mais c'est à ces beautés / Que je viens immoler toutes mes volontés]”
(ll. 371–2). He would be content to make the brilliance of her eyes his kings and
gods (“J’en aurais fait mes rois, j’en aurais fait mes dieux”; ll. 1330). And this
makes Sévère’s effort to reconcile himself to the disappointment of Pauline’s mar-
riage the more heroic. The struggle of these two to resist each other in the name
of pagan virtue is reiterated on a higher plane when Polyeucte puts aside his wife
in the name of God.110 However gallant they may be, Sévère’s priorities stand
in stark contrast to the demand of Jesus in Luke 14: 26, a text that Polyeucte
evidently means to live and die by: “If any man come to me, and hateth not his
father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and
his owne life besides: he cannot be my disciple” (trans. Douay-Rheims; cf. Poly-
eucte ll. 684–92).
The persons of the drama operate on distinct moral planes defined by the rela-
tionship of their reason and will to their passions. At the bottom, Félix is subject
to the full range of appetites, from love, sympathy, and admiration to venal ambi-
tion, suspicion, fear, and indignation, and he seems incapable of governing his
feelings:
No one knows the woes that my heart suffers. With thought on thought my soul is
agitated, with care on care it is disquieted; I feel love, hate, fear, hope, joy, and grief
move it in turns.
On ne sait pas les maux dont mon cœur est atteint:
De pensers sur pensers mon âme est agitée,
De soucis sur soucis elle est inquiétée;
Je sens l’amour, la haine, et la crainte, et l’espoir,
La joie et la douleur, tour à tour l’émouvoir. (ll. 1004–8)
Sévère and Pauline, in contrast, represent the higher moral plane of Roman
virtue in its masculine and feminine aspects. Sévère repeatedly displays his gen-
erosity of soul through his self-restraint. Indeed, A. W. Schlegel remarks that the
“practical magnanimity of this Roman, in conquering his passion, throws Poly-
eucte’s self-renunciation, which appears to cost him nothing, quite in the shade.”111
Sévère’s practical magnanimity reaches its climax in his final speech, when he
­declares that he hopes to understand Christians better; meanwhile he will leave
them unmolested, trusting that they can serve both their god and his emperor
(ll. 1800–4). Pauline maintains her integrity by assenting to her duties as daughter
and wife, regardless of the personal toll. Seeking to avoid a painful interview with
Sévère, she explains to her father that, although her virtue will prevail beyond
doubt, she shrinks from the hard struggle. She is far from enjoying that blessed

110 Doubrovsky (1963) 234 writes, “the tragedy presents itself, quite simply, as the two-fold
­account of the combat of Pauline against Sévère and of Polyeucte against Pauline.”
111 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 287.
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238 What Was Tragedy?

peace that is produced when reason and the sensitive appetite work toward the
same ends, like a ruler and his free subjects. Her reason can maintain control only
by despotic measures:
My reason, it is true, subdues my feelings, but with such authority as it holds, it does
not rule, it tyrannizes over them; and while my outside may be unperturbed, inside
there is nothing but tumult and sedition.
Ma raison, il est vrai, dompte mes sentiments,
Mais, quelque autorité que sur eux elle ait prise,
Elle n’y règne pas, elle les tyrannise;
Et, quoique le dehors soit sans émotion,
Le dedans n’est que trouble et que sédition. (ll. 500–4)
She does not conceal her struggle even from her husband Polyeucte, such is her
unwavering veracity: “One suffers in resisting, one suffers in defending against
them, and even though virtue triumphs over these flames of love, the victory is
painful, and the combat shameful [On souffre à résister, on souffre à s’en défendre;
/ Et, bien que la vertu triomphe de ces feux, / La victoire est pénible, et le combat
honteux]” (ll. 618–20). If Félix can be said to experience his revolutions of the
passions as hapless suffering, pathos for Pauline is generated by the agon of the will
with the appetites.
Polyeucte’s struggle with his own bodily fears and appetites seems easier than
Pauline’s not because his manners are naturally more virtuous but because his
worldly appetites are displaced by a sacred ardor and his will fortified by the gifts
of grace. Far from being inconsistent with heroic virtue, sacred ardor was con-
ceived by the Jesuits as indispensable to it.112 Yet Polyeucte’s will initially ­reveals
itself in the form of prudent retreat. When confronted with the choice of deferring
his baptism to placate the fears of his distraught wife, who has dreamt that he will
die that day at the hands of her father and the Christians, Polyeucte eventually fol-
lows the advice of his friend Néarque: He flees when he feels his heart yielding.
Even after Polyeucte has been baptized and has smashed the sacred idols, he must
rehearse the same spiritual movement, this time in a monologue of leave-taking, a
congé d’amour. In a series of five stanzas that is profoundly influenced by the Spir-
itual Exercises, he frees himself from the shameful bonds of the flesh and the world;
foresees the downfall of Rome; foretells the destruction of the cruel Decius; aspires
to his own martyrdom, declaring the world nought, his heart alight with a sacred
fire, and Pauline nothing but an obstacle to higher things; and then fills his heart
with holy imaginings of that blessed shore of eternal contentment (ll. 1105–54).
When Pauline makes her stage entrance after these spiritual exercises, Polyeucte
can for the first time behold her with indifference:
I see her, but my heart, inflamed with holy zeal, no longer feels the charms by which
it was enchanted, and my eyes, made clear by celestial light, no longer find in hers
their usual graces.

112 Clarke (1992) 236–8.

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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 239

Je la vois, mais mon cœur, d’un saint zèle enflammé,
N’en goûte plus l’appas dont il était charmé;
Et mes yeux éclairés des célestes lumières,
Ne trouvent plus aux siens leurs grâces coutumières. (ll. 1157–60)
When Polyeucte utters his solitary “Alas” (l. 1253) in the next scene, it is, as Joseph
Pineau argues, because he is recalled to a recognition of the conjugal “we” that he
has forgotten amid his religious rapture, but his tears and sighs are not those of a
husband moved by his wife. They are “the sign of a rupture.”113 He has separated
himself from the things of this world. “Live happy in the world,” he enjoins her,
“and leave me in peace [Vivez heureuse au monde, et me laissez en paix]” (l. 1290).
That Polyeucte’s actions may be inspired by grace is suggested by a speech in
the opening scene of the play that is studded with vocabulary central to the con-
troversy over grace that had just been reignited by the publication of Jansen’s
Augustinus (1640). Néarque warns Polyeucte that he cannot feel assured of per-
severing because God’s grace does not always descend with the same efficacy
(ll. 25–30). Corneille appears to have relied for his own conceptions on his Jesuit
professor of rhetoric, Claude Delidel, who defines grace as “an inspiration, a know-
ledge, a supernatural light that God pours into our understanding[,] . . . a divine
enticement, a celestial fire that takes hold of our heart and which inflames a sacred
desire to perform faithfully what God asks of our liberty.” Yet “we can cooperate
with grace or reject it . . . because we are free,” stresses Delidel. “It is in our liberty
to obey the inspirations of God or to reject them.”114 Néarque confesses that
grace works less forcefully in him than it did immediately after his baptism, but
the example of Polyeucte fortifies him (ll. 693–708).115 Nevertheless, both Poly-
eucte’s initiative and Néarque’s emulation are freely undertaken. When counseled
that he is not bound to seek out death, Polyeucte replies, “Then it is more voluntary,
and merits more [Plus elle est volontaire, et plus elle mérite]” (l. 658). Pauline is
right to insist to her father that he is a Christian because he has wished it (“il l’a
voulu”; l. 943). In the midst of his stanze, he announces, as if to himself and his
God, “I consent, or rather I aspire to my ruin [Je consens, ou plutôt j’aspire à
ma ruine]” (l. 1139).
When Pauline makes her stage entrance after the execution of her husband, she
is bespattered with blood—a thing of breathtaking, sublime, paradoxical beauty.
“Barbarous father, finish, finish your handiwork. This second victim is worthy of
your rage. Join your daughter to your son-in-law. Dare to. What are you waiting
for? [Père barbare, achève, achève ton ouvrage; / Cette seconde hostie est digne de
ta rage; / Joins ta fille à ton gendre; ose : que tardes-tu?]” (ll. 1719–21). We are left
wondering whether her new-found identification with her husband’s faith is the
result of admiration founded on judgment, of his parting injunction to preserve
his memory (l. 1680), or of trauma. Is her conversion anything more than a morbid

113 Pineau (1975) 548. For other interpretations of this scene, see Calvet (1992) 163; Nadal
(1948) 213.
114 Delidel (1668) 23, 339. Clarke (1992) 246 discusses these passages.
115 On the theme of emulation, see Harvey (1967).
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240 What Was Tragedy?

death-wish induced by grief? Has it, as Pauline seems to imply, been effected by the
sacramental effect of a martyr’s blood? She certainly insists that it is grace that
speaks, not despair (l. 1742):
In dying my husband left his light to me. His blood, in which his executioners covered
me, has unsealed my eyes and opened them. I see, I know, I believe, I am released from
error. With that blessed blood you see me baptized.
Mon époux en mourant m’a laissé ses lumières;
Son sang, dont tes bourreaux viennent de me couvrir
M’a dessillé les yeux, et me les vient d’ouvrir.
Je vois, je sais, je crois, je suis désabusée;
De ce bienheureux sang tu me vois baptisée. (ll. 1724–8)
A yet more improbable conversion remains. Félix, who has been prey to ambition,
fear, and the miseries of Machiavellian calculation and projection, announces that he
finds himself mysteriously constrained, yielding to transports that he cannot under-
stand but that he attributes to the intercession of a saint (ll. 1769–76). As Corneille
insists upon the power and mystery of grace, which can touch hearts when least
thought upon (l. 1277), he flouts the expectations of ordinary verisimilitude in a bid
to produce a response of wonder, fear, and the sublime apprehension of our freedom
amid a providential history that exceeds our comprehension.
The success of Polyeucte was long-lived. Until 1750, the players of the Comédie-
Française routinely elected to open or close their season with it. The Jesuits also
adopted it as their own, not only in France but in Italy, where it was presented in
Italian translation and in public performances hosted by Jesuit colleges and played
by visiting troupes of French actors in their native tongue.116 Polyeucte is just one
example of the way the Jesuits appropriated popular theater for their own uses and
in turn influenced the course of theater outside the confines of their college walls.

J E S U I T D E F E N S E S O F C O U N T E R - R E F O R M AT I O N
TRAGEDY

Upon publication of the first commentaries on the Poetics around 1550, it became
apparent to critics that chapter 13 might disqualify Christ and the saints from the
role of tragic hero. Aristotle maintains that “virtuous men” should not “be shown
shifting from good fortune to bad, for this is not fearful, and not pitiable either,
but morally shocking [liaqæm].” As Else explains, liaqæm means literally “unclean”
or “polluted,” especially by blood-guilt.117 Although Aristotle’s four-fold schema of
heroes and changes of fortune (lesabokñ) includes the possibility that a virtuous
man may change from unhappiness to happiness, he considers such an outcome to
be so evidently neither pathetic nor fearful that he does not even bother to analyze
it. What tragedy calls for is a man “who on the one hand is not a paragon of virtue
and justice and on the other hand does not suffer the change to misfortune because

116 Yanitelli (1943) 86–9.    117 Else (1967) 368.

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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 241

of wickedness or villainy but because of some mistake [laqs¨am]” (1453a7–10;

trans. Else). Only such a hero can generate the pity and fear proper to tragedy.118
A long tradition of Aristotelean criticism that stretches from the sixteenth century
to the present has used chapter 13 to argue that martyrs cannot be tragic heroes
because, whether we classify their pathos as the unmerited suffering or the fortu-
nate change of a virtuous man, they do not fall within Aristotle’s middle range. As
André Dacier explains succinctly in 1692 (after faulting Polyeucte for violating
Aristotle’s standard), “in whatever manner we regard Martyrdom, either as a good,
or an evil, it cannot excite either Pity or Fear; and consequently can’t refine the
Passions.”119
In his vernacular commentary on the Poetics (1570, 1576), Ludovico Castelvetro
denies the psychological premise that leads Aristotle to describe the suffering of a
virtuous man as “morally shocking” or “polluted.” In a rejoinder that Galluzzi and
other apologists for counter-reformation tragedy gratefully appropriate, Castelvetro
maintains that even if Aristotle rightly characterizes the manners and religious
­beliefs of ancient audiences, there is no reason to assume that modern Christians
will respond the same way to the unmerited suffering of a holy man.120 In the first
place, Castelvetro expands the class of philoi, or persons bound by ties of natural
affection, who may be suitably entangled in the pathê, or painful events, of a tragic
fable. As Else’s translation makes clear, Aristotle seems to conceive of philoi as
blood relations:
Let us define, then, which kinds of acts appeal to people as horrible and which as pitiable.
Now such acts must necessarily be done to one another by persons who are bound by
natural ties of affection, or are enemies, or neither. Well then, if by an enemy to an
enemy, there is nothing pathetic either in the doing or the intention, except at the
actual moment of the deed; nor if by persons who are neither; but when the painful
deed [phg] is done in the context of close family [uik¨ai|] relationships, for example
when a brother kills or intends to kill a brother, or a son a father, or a mother a son,
or a son a mother, or does something else of the kind—those are the acts one should
look for. (Poetics 1453b14–23; trans. Else)
But Castelvetro maintains that dramatic persons such as holy men, virgins, and
innocent children may be considered akin to philoi because they deserve the r­ espect
of all. This extension of the class of philoi does gain some plausibility from the
regular linking of philia and aidōs, love and respect, in Homeric Greek, which
leads Gustave Glotz to conclude that “all those who are united by the reciprocal
duties of aidōs are called philoi.”121 It could furthermore be excused, if not justi-
fied, by Aristotle’s discussion of friendships based on virtue or excellence in the
Nichomachean Ethics (8.12–14). Even if the suffering of such innocent victims did

118 For various accounts of Aristotle’s claim, see Halliwell (1998) 178–80; Heath (1987) 81–2; and
Stinton (1975) 229.
119 Dacier (1692) 178, trans. in Aristotle (1705) 190–1.
120 Galluzzi (1633) 110–11.
121 Glotz (1904) 138. On philia in the Poetics, see Else (1967) 349–52, 391–8, 414–15; and
Belfiore (1992) 70–92. On philia more generally in Greek tragedy, see Blundell (1989) 26–59
and Belfiore (2000).
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242 What Was Tragedy?

fill audiences with indignation against God, it does not follow, says Castelvetro,
that they would feel less pity or fear for the victim. But in any case, it does not
provoke moral scandal among Christians. For the common people have many
ways of retaining their belief in God. They can turn “their hate against the imme-
diate causes which by God’s permissive will had the power to work the holy man’s
hurt.” Or they can conclude that the man has been “tried by misfortune so that
he may become more perfect, as gold is refined in the fire. Or they may reason
that he has been ill treated because God chose this way to manifest His glory.”122
Pallavicino maintains that the success of the Jesuit theater vindicates Castelvetro’s
claim: Martyr plays have proven themselves able to excite the most tender devo-
tion in every class of spectator, drawing tears from great intellects and melting the
eyes of the obdurate.123
That martyr dramas might not qualify as tragedies because death marks a change
for the better in Christian belief occurred to some early modern critics, but it has
been even more forcefully stated in the twentieth century. “The least touch of any
theology which has a compensating Heaven to offer the tragic hero is fatal” to the
effect of tragedy, says I. A. Richards.124 “Tragedy, in its pure idea, shows us a mortal
will engaged in an unequal struggle with destiny, whether that destiny be represented
by the forces within or without the mind,” writes S. H. Butcher in a commentary
on the Poetics inflected by idealist expectations. “The conflict reaches its tragic issue
when the individual perishes, but through his ruin the disturbed order of the world
is restored and the moral forces re-assert their sway. The death of the martyr presents
to us not a defeat, but the victory of the individual; the issue of a conflict in which
the individual is ranged on the same side as the higher powers, and the sense of
suffering consequently lost in that of moral triumph.”125 “The Christian hero has
the card of immortality and beatitude with which he can trump the last tricks of
his opponents, Paganism and Death,” concurs Martin Jarrett-Kerr. “Heads may be
severed from bodies, but there is no suffering: what seems to be agony is unreal
because it is willed, not undergone—the victim remains in control.”126
Donati’s answer to such objections is that the serenity of the martyr, which is an
extraordinary result of his free will and the gift of grace, is not easy for an audience
to identify with. Instead, they wonder at it, fearing what exceeds their faculties,
and in the meantime the horror of the physical punishment perturbs their souls.
Even if a tyrant on stage stirs up affections such as hate or anger that are contrary
to pity and fear, these can co-exist with the tragic passions. Whereas Piccolomini
had suggested, in glossing chapter 13 of the Poetics, that the affective capacity of
souls was finite and that when audiences felt hatred or loathing for a malefactor
they might be less able to feel pity for his victim, Donati denies the claim. Theseus
may deserve our odium for the injury he does his innocent son, but that passion
does not prevent our feeling fear and pity for Hippolytus, nor does it prevent our
feeling pity even for the father, since he was persuaded of his son’s guilt.127
122 Castelvetro (1978–79 [1570, 1576]) 1: 360–3, translated in Bongiorno (1984) 163.
123 Pallavicino (1644) 145.    124 Richards (1948) 246.
125 Butcher (1932) 311–12.    126 Jarrett-Kerr (1954) 62.
127 Donati (1633) 167–70; Pallavicino (1644) 144–5.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 243

Donati is less interested in the “pure idea of tragedy” than in the actual range to
be found in the corpus of extent tragedies. He notes that numerous persons suffer
without ever committing a hamartia, or intellectual error. They include Hippolytus,
the children of Heracles, Thyestes, Medea, Alcestis, Macaria, Iphigenia, and
Polyxena.128 And both some of these and others who do make a mistake display
exemplary virtue. Hippolytus cultivates his chastity, Alcestis dies to prolong the life
of her husband, and we admire the Heracles of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis.
The Hercules of Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus is even carried into the heavens by clouds
once his pyre is lighted, whence he admonishes his mother to cease lamenting
for him. If the ancients could applaud such tragedies, asks Donati, why shouldn’t
Catholics dramatize martyrdoms and call these, too, tragedies? He instances
Macaria, who dies for her city with heroic resolution in Euripides’ The Children
of Heracles: “Lead me to the place where it seems good that my body should be
killed and garlanded and consecrated to the goddess! Defeat the enemy! For my life
is at your disposal, full willingly, and I offer to be put to death on my brothers’
behalf and on my own. For, mark it well, by not clinging to my life I have made a
most splendid discovery, how to die with glory” (ll. 528–34).
Yet it is Galluzzi who responds most courageously and creatively to chapter 13
of the Poetics, for he undertakes to do nothing less than expose Aristotle’s compli-
city with tyranny. In his Renewal of Ancient Tragedy (1633), dedicated to Cardinal
Francesco Barberini, a former pupil at the Collegio Romano, the nephew of Pope
Urban VIII, and an important patron of the arts, Galluzzi maintains that the font
and origin of tragedy was the Athenians’ love of liberty and hatred of tyrants. The
basis of his claim is the Minos, a dialogue that classicists now generally ascribe not
to Plato himself but to a pupil or follower. The ostensible subject of the dialogue,
which Delrio also makes use of in his treatise on tragedy, is the nature of law, but
the conversation turns to tragedy when Socrates says that Minos was a great law-
giver.129 Then why, objects his companion, is he reputed to have been uneducated
and harsh-tempered? Minos’ mistake, says Socrates, was in waging war on Athens,
a city that has poets of every kind, especially tragic ones: “Now tragedy is a thing
of ancient standing here; it did not begin, as people suppose, from Thespis or
Phrynicus, but if you will reflect, you will find it a very ancient tradition of our
city. Tragedy is the most popularly delightful and soul-enthralling branch of poetry;
in it, accordingly, we get Minos on the rack of verse, and thus avenge ourselves for
that tribute which he compelled us to pay” (Minos 320d–321a).130 The most poetic
accounts, which persisted despite the denials of the Cretans and Aristotle alike,
held that every nine years the Athenians were compelled to send seven young men
and women to Crete to be destroyed by the Minotaur or to wander to their deaths
in the labyrinth. “And verily it seems to be a grievous thing for a man to be at
enmity with a city which has a language and a literature,” observes Plutarch in his Life
of Theseus (16.2–3). “For Minos was always abused and reviled in the Attic theatres;
and it did not avail him either that Hesiod called him ‘most royal,’ or that Homer

128 Donati (1633) 177–8, 186.    129 Delrio (1593–95) 20.

130 Plato (1955), trans. Lamb.
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244 What Was Tragedy?

styled him ‘a confident of Zeus,’ but the tragic poets prevailed, and from platform
and stage, showered obloquy down upon him, as a man of cruelty and violence.”131
Galluzzi supposes that Athens must have celebrated the return of Theseus from
his encounter with the Minotaur with festivals that included figured dances with
“interweavings, entanglements, and disentanglements both artful and wondrous,
which imitated the intricate paths of the Labyrinth. From such festivals, the first
tragedy against Minos must have been born and come to light, permitting the city
to behold its liberation” from a tyrant who had exacted a harsh tribute and held the
city in a state of thrall.132 Even in later centuries, Galluzzi speculates, tragedy must
have retained a vestigial memory of this origin in the movements of its chorus:
I think that the tragic chorus also fashioned various windings, curvings, and—as it
were—coils, while it was coming forward or dancing to a beat, since those turnings, as
they called the strophes and antistrophes, recalled not only that passage of the heavenly
planets and wandering stars about which we spoke above, but also the various windings
and impossible-to-unravel twists of the Labyrinth. For many, particularly Faustus
Victorinus in his book on Comedy, recount that those strophes and antistrophes had
been created by Theseus to commemorate the pathways of the twisting Labyrinth
from which he had exited safe and sound. Therefore it was necessary that they be not
only circular but also twisting, entangled, and diverse.133
At its first performance, the dance of Theseus and the Athenian youth had recre-
ated a nightmarish labyrinth that threatened blind wandering and death in order
that they might enact their own triumph over tyranny. The prime and ancient end
of tragedy, then, was to engender a hatred of tyranny in the soul of the people by
making them watch the examples of the cruelty and barbarity of tyrants while cul-
tivating—not least through the chorus—a love of liberty. For at its root, choral
dance was a joyous affirmation of freedom.134
It would square with what we know of the values of the Athenians to imagine
that tragedy had some such beginning, says Galluzzi, for the first public statues
that they erected commemorated the bravery of two would-be tyrannicides,
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, whose unsuccessful attempt to cut down Hipias in
514 bc was remembered as a step toward Athenian democracy.135 Phrynicus’
tragedy on the Capture of Miletus (511 bc) engendered such excessive grief among
the Athenians precisely because it forebode their loss of liberty. But Aristotle
could not acknowledge the true end of tragedy because he wrote at a time when
the ancient liberty of Greece was extinct. Adapting to his political circumstances,
for it would not do to offend Philip of Macedon or Alexander the Great, Aristotle
praised tragedies in which persons of middling virtue bring suffering on them-
selves through some error. Although Aristotle justifies this formula in affective
terms, saying that our pity and terror are aroused most effectively if we can iden-
tify with those on stage, his ulterior motive is to divert enmity away from tyrants

131 Plutarch (1917), trans. Perrin, 31–3.    132 Galluzzi (1633) 33–4.
133 Galluzzi (1621) 281.    134 Galluzzi (1633) 37.
135 For the place of Harmodius and Aristogeiton in Athenian art, see Michael Taylor (1981).
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 245

and to use pity and fear to teach his contemporaries prudence and an acceptance
of servitude.136
Aristotle’s ideal is so innovative in the history of Greek tragedy, says Galluzzi,
that we ought by rights to distinguish between old and new tragedy. Old tragedy
as Galluzzi defines it runs from the time of Theseus, through Thespis and Phrynicus
(who wrote tragedies on Alcestis, the daughters of Danaus, and Tantalus—none of
them middling characters), and onto Euripides. Indeed, Euripides is the exemplary
old-style tragedian, one who is not afraid to depict the tyranny of Minos in his lost
Cretans or the suffering of a pure young man in his Hippolytus. The new tragedy is
a critical invention of Aristotle, an invention that may appeal to the example of
Sophocles for sanction but that became politically necessary only during the reign
of Alexander. Although Galluzzi recognizes that the Old Testament can furnish
characters who meet all the requirements of an Aristotelean hero who falls into
misfortune by committing an error (as Jephthah does), he urges his contempor-
aries to follow the Minos when determining the ends of tragedy and the persons
who should be introduced to the stage and to obey the Poetics only when deciding
on other elements of dramatic craft. For the Minos could be invoked to sanction
plays which sought to inspire a hatred of tyranny while confirming the spectators
in their faith, as they watched inhuman cruelties inflicted on those faithful martyrs
who died “with steadfast and happy countenances, with intrepid hearts, and often
with unheard of wonders of nature, such as fire that did not burn them, water that
did not drown them, iron that did not cut them, winds whipped up by their
deaths, tremors of the earth demonstrating its empathy and pain, and other more
manifest and wondrous signs of their Faith.”137
One of the great advantages of the tragic stage was that, unlike epic, which
could operate only on the ears, it could “invade the eyes” and thus “open a path”
to the souls of the audience “by force.”138 For this reason, the professors at the
Collegio Romano bridled at Horace’s restrictions on the depiction of stage vio-
lence and marvelous transformations in his Art of Poetry, where, after admitting
that what finds entrance through the eye more vividly stirs the mind, he neverthe-
less insists that Medea’s butchery of her boys, Atreus’ preparation of human flesh
to eat, Procne’s transformation into a bird, and Cadmus’ metamorphosis into a
snake are not fit to be staged: They should only be narrated by an actor (Art of
Poetry ll. 180–8). Both Donati and Galluzzi are at such pains to refute Horace
that they produce a version of ancient theater that is positively grizzly. They argue,
in a misreading of Philostratus, that the ancient Greeks used to kill real men on
stage for the sake of realism before Aeschylus invented the messenger’s speech,
and they observe more accurately that the Romans revived the practice of theat-
rical bloodshed, c­ astrating criminals cast in the role of Atys and burning alive
those cast as Hercules.139 Whatever Horace’s tastes may have been, says Donati,

136 Galluzzi (1633) 56–8.    137 Galluzzi (1633) esp. 52–3, 59–63, 66; quotation at 63.
138 Delrio (1593–95) 6.
139 Galluzzi writes of Horace’s prohibition: “It is very difficult to imitate those killings, mutilations,
and wounds, so the watcher is indignant that those things are presented to him as to one who is
unknowledgeable and ignorant. The very oldest makers of tragedies saw this difficulty. Since they had
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246 What Was Tragedy?

they were not those of his fellow Romans who gathered to watch bloody ludi. Far from
shunning the troubling comparison of tragedy with gladiatorial exhibitions—a com-
parison that has a long and equivocal history in accounts of tragic pleasure—Donati
embraces it because he maintains that the more horrible the evils in tragedies, the
more likely we are to feel wonder (admiratio). Rather than fret about the problems
of unconvincing staging, Donati keeps his eyes on the sublime effects of a violence
that exceeds all measure.140

ENLIGHTENED CRITIQUES AND IDEALIST DEFENSES

In the opening numbers of his 1767–68 Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische

Dramaturgie), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing takes the occasion of a new tragedy
based on an episode in Tasso to consign all martyr tragedies, including Corneille’s
Polyeucte, the best of them, to a superstitious age that should be kept securely in the
past: “Now we live in an age when the voice of healthy reason resounds too loudly
to allow every fanatic who rushes into death wantonly, without need, without
regard to all his citizen duties, to assume to himself the title of martyr.” Thinking
back on the religious strife of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, when
Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Catholics sought to distinguish their “true” martyrs
from “false” claimants to the palm, Lessing implies that any person on the Enlight-
enment stage who behaved like Polyeucte would be an embarrassment.141 It is no
excuse that “there were ages when such superstition was general and could subsist
side by side with many excellent qualities, that there still are countries where it
would be nothing strange for pious ignorance.” The good author must write for the
“best and most intelligent of his time and country”; he cannot write for another
age or another country. Because the theater should be “the school of the moral
world,” everything in it must arise from “natural causes”; there is no place for the
“immediate operations of grace.” Lessing’s advice is “to leave all existing Christian

not yet thought up those reports of messengers, and yet were attempting to draw pity out of a
savage deed, they actually and truly killed on stage some of those people who were to be put death
and who had been condemned to the ultimate punishment. This so savage and barbaric custom
Aeschylus first banished from Athens, as Giraldi in his History of the Poets shows from Philostratus,
and certain Roman emperors, more savage than those ancient ones, afterwards brought it back to
the stage.” Galluzzi refers to Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Historiæ poetarum, 2: 250, which Delrio
(1593–95) 21 had previously cited: “But Philostratus in the life of Apollonius left it written thus:
When Aeschylus (he says) saw that the Tragic art was too disordered and cruel and harsh, he restrained
it a bit. For he drew the Chorus together, which before this had been separated, and he removed
the frequent and regular responses of the actors; in addition, he prevented killings from being enacted
on stage—clearly so that men would not be slaughtered while the people were there present
[Cum Aeschylus, inquit, artem Tragicam confusam nimis, & crudelem immitemque videret, eam
aliquantum moderatus est: nam in vnum Choros contraxit, qui antea disiuncti fuerunt: abstulit &
frequentes crebrasque histrionum responsiones: neces insuper in scena fieri vetuit, ne scilicet
præsente populo homines trucidarentur].” For a briefer statement of the same claim, see Donati
(1633) 150.
140 Donati (1633) 150–1, 163.
141 For an invaluable comparative account of early modern martyrdom, see Brad S. Gregory
(1991), esp. ch. 1 on true and false martyrs.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 247

tragedies unperformed” until “a work of genius arises that incontestably decides

these objections.”142
Although August Wilhelm Schlegel shares Lessing’s disappointment in Corneille’s
martyr tragedy, he objects not that the theater must confine itself to natural causes
but that “the wonders of grace are rather affirmed, than embraced by a mysterious
illumination” in Polyeucte. He deems it unjust to infer from Corneille’s handling of
the theme that martyrdom is in general “an unfavorable subject of Tragedy.” For
“the cheerfulness with which martyrs embraced pain and death did not proceed
from want of feeling, but from the heroism of the highest love: they must previ-
ously, in struggles painful beyond expression, have obtained the victory over every
earthly tie; and by the exhibition of these struggles, of these sufferings of our
mortal nature, while the seraph soars on its flight to heaven the poet may awaken
in us the most fervent emotion.”143 Schlegel, who had interrupted his translation
of Shakespeare in 1801 to begin work on translations of Calderón’s plays that hon-
ored the frequently changing verse forms of the original, is clearly thinking of the
Spanish poet as a more successful alternative.
By 1804, Schlegel’s translation of The Constant Prince was already circulating
in manuscript to his brother Friedrich and to Goethe, who forwarded it to Schiller
with a warm commendation. After declaiming The Constant Prince in its entirety
in 1807, Goethe became convinced that the martyr play still held promise as
a form.144 He not only began work on his own dramatic sketches known as Tragedy
in Christendom (Trauerspiel in der Christenheit), he staged The Constant Prince at
the Ducal Theater at Weimar in 1811, emphasizing the symbolico-sensual action
of the play, using mime, decoration, stage tableaux, transformations, and a styl-
ized, musical style of vocal delivery to create a symbolic whole that might be
described as a poetry of the eye and ear.145 As Goethe was much concerned in
these years with the question of how dramatic poetry ought to be realized as
­theater, I suspect that he may have reflected back on what he had seen of the
Jesuit theater in Regensburg almost twenty-five years before, when he was pre-
sent for the end of an opera and the beginning of a tragedy. Since the Jesuit order
had been dissolved some thirteen years earlier, the performance could not have
lived up to the standards of a more auspicious time. Nevertheless, Goethe was
struck by its sensuous appeal:
They did not act worse than many an inexperienced company of amateurs, and their
dresses were beautiful, almost too superb. This public exhibition served to convince
me still more strongly of the worldly prudence of the Jesuits. They neglect nothing
that is likely to produce an effect, and contrive to practice it with interest and care.
In this there is not merely prudence . . . ; it is associated with a real pleasure in the
matter at hand, a sympathy and fellow feeling, a taste, such as arises from the experi-
ence of life. . . . Assuredly there are some [in this society] who patronize the stage
with learning and taste; and just as they decorate their churches with appropriate

142 Nos. 1–2 in Lessing (1962 [1767–68]) 5–9. For the context of Lessing’s remarks, see Robertson
(1939) 421–4.
143 A. W. Schlegel (1846) 287–8.    144 Atkins (1995) 85–6; Sullivan (1983) 186–8.
145 Sullivan (1983) esp. 183–95, 245–51.
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248 What Was Tragedy?

ornaments, these clear-sighted men take advantage of the world’s sensual eye by an
imposing theatre.146
To be sure, Goethe made concessions to the secular humanism of Weimar: He cut
lines in favor of the Catholic faith, instructed the lead actor P. A. Wolff to maintain
a posture of heroic constancy, and omitted some of the most graphic details of the
prince’s beastly suffering and incarceration. But in this form, The Constant Prince
was an instant success, bringing tears to the eyes of the audience when the dead
prince stood resurrected in glory on the stage. When E. T. A. Hoffman produced
the same play for a Catholic audience in Bamberg, he too brought out the play’s
potential as total theater, though he strove for a more pronounced effect of mysti-
cism, showing Fernando kneeling before the feet of Christ in a final tableau, as the
Christians knelt in veneration and the Moors fell stupified to the ground.147 Both
productions embraced the Jesuits’ deployment of spectacle, emblem, pantomime,
and music to produce a total effect in which the Dionysian did not, as in Nietzsche’s
model, trump the Apolline in the end.148
Schlegel’s brilliant translations prompted some of his contemporaries to assimi-
late Calderón to their idealist and romantic literary systems and to produce three
accounts of Christian tragedy that deserve to be tested against the repertoire of
counter-reformation tragedy.149 In his 1815 Lectures on the History of Literature,
Ancient and Modern (Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur), Friedrich Schlegel
sets Calderón at the summit of a three-tiered hierarchy whose lowest rung is occu-
pied by plays that capture the fleeting surface of the world. Shakespeare dominates
the second rung because he offers an inwardly penetrating characterization of the
world in its totality, portraying man’s existence in its riddling complexity. But drama
can also lead life out of the confusion of the present to some final disposition, fol-
lowing a trajectory like Dante’s Divine Comedy, a work that, as John Freccero has
demonstrated, inscribes the journey of descent and ascent basic to conversion.150
Erecting yet another three-part hierarchy, Schlegel then takes up the question
of tragic catastrophes. The ancients, he says, showed a marked preference for the
hero’s total destruction. A middle form, represented by Aeschylus’ Oresteia and
Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, ends in reconciliation. But plays such as The Constant
Prince depict the most dire suffering in order to portray a spiritual transfiguration.
Even when a fable does not depict new life springing up from death and suffering
(Crispus would be an example), a spirit of Christian love may nevertheless diffuse
its light over the whole.
It is not the effect of spiritual transfiguration but a dialectic of freedom and
necessity that Friedrich Schelling finds in Calderón. Even though Schelling’s
knowledge of the playwright was limited to a single play, Devotion of the Cross,
which he read in Schlegel’s translation, he thinks this sufficient evidence to confirm
his earlier reading of Oedipus. There must be “sin and sinners so that through the

146 Goethe (1848–49) 2: 239.    147 Sullivan (1983) 251–3.

148 Nietzsche (1967) 129–30.
149 On idealist responses to Calderón, see the excellent discussion in Sullivan (1983) ch. 9.
150 Freccero (1986).
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 249

mediation of the church God may prove his grace,” he says.151 Johannes Schulze
sets this Kantian reading on a firmer historical foundation when he makes an
­observation that has been an important premise of this chapter: that the sixteenth-
century disputes over grace license such interpretations because “the Molinism of
the sixteenth century was a new-style, grandiose attempt to fuse together in one
synthesis the polar opposites of human freedom and infallibly efficacious grace,
foresight and predestination.”152
Finally, Arthur Schopenhauer commends Christian tragedy for its lesson of res-
ignation. The horrors of tragedy reveal “the bitterness and worthlessness of life,”
which can in turn encourage the resignation of the will to live that is our salvation
from the world of willing. But ancient tragedy has this effect only by implication
because its heroes display “little of the spirit of resignation, little of the turning
away from the will to life.” Oedipus, Cassandra, Iphigenia may die willingly, but
they die consoled by thoughts of revenge or the welfare of Greece. Heracles in
The Women of Trachis “yields to necessity, and dies composed, but not resigned.”
Hippolytus submits to fate and the will of the gods, but he does not surrender his
will-to-live.153 In Christian tragedy, on the other hand, we can look on as the soul
of the hero is transfigured and as
the motives that were previously so powerful now lose their force, and instead of them,
the complete knowledge of the real nature of the world, acting as a quieter of the will,
produces resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live
itself. Thus we see in tragedy the noblest men, after a long conflict and suffering,
­finally renounce forever all the pleasures of life and the aims till then pursued so
keenly, or cheerfully and willingly giving up life itself. Thus the steadfast prince
in Calderón, Gretchen in Faust, Hamlet whom his friend Horatio would gladly
follow. . . . They all die purified by suffering, in other words after the will-to-live has
already expired in them.154
If Schopenhauer had known Crispus, he might have observed that the difference
between ancient and Christian tragedy is summed up in Stefonio’s transformation
of the Hippolytus figure: Crispus does not just submit to fate and the will of the
gods, he willingly assumes responsibility for a crime he has not committed and
resigns his will to live. Although Schopenhauer’s conviction that human existence
is essentially and metaphysically tragic distinguishes his account of Christian tragedy
from that of the Jesuits, who conceived of tragedy as just one genre in a larger
system whose totality was required to reveal human existence in all its facets, his
account of the tragic hero’s final resignation, and his useful insight that resigna-
tion may be a species of the tragic sublime because it intimates, however darkly,
the possibility of an alternative order of existence, of a world-without-willing, can
be usefully applied to many counter-reformation tragedies. In some Jesuit tra-
gedies, it might be suggested by lighting the scene of torture after the death of the
martyr, thus dilating the moment of sacrificial death and intimating an alternative

151 Schelling (1989) 273–6, qt. at 275.

152 Schulze (1811), preface, xi, quoted and trans. in Sullivan (1983) 222.
153 Schopenhauer (1966) 2: 434–5.    154 Schopenhauer (1966) 1: 253.
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250 What Was Tragedy?

existence.155 In Crispus it appears in the visage of the condemned man as “the

brief gleaming of uncertain light” that “shines below a purple cloud as the sun
is setting.”

F I N A L R E C KO N I N G S

Both the poetics of counter-reformation tragedy pioneered by Jesuits such as

Donati and Galluzzi and the philosophical accounts of Christian tragedy pro-
duced by Schlegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer suggest that the repertoire of
counter-reformation tragedy should not be dismissed out of hand, even if it is vul-
nerable to criticism by both Aristotelean and idealist standards. It is self-evident
that if we are to write histories of the mentalité of early modern Europe, we cannot
safely ignore a repertoire of tens of thousands of tragedies. But these tragedies need
not be of merely historical interest. We should not underestimate how salutary
­encounters with the uncouth and uncompromising productions of another era can
be for critics and theater audiences; indeed, at this historical remove, the art of the
Counter-Reformation may have as much potential to shock and provoke as that of
the avant garde.
A deeper immersion in the tragedies of the Counter-Reformation may also
­encourage literary historians to refine their general claims about tragedy. Thus far,
I have been at pains to argue that the idealist philosophy of the tragic, which iden-
tifies the tragic sublime with the Kantian antinomy of freedom and necessity,
underrates the value that the early modern poetics of tragedy attached to pathos
and discounts other antagonisms (such virtus and fortuna) that furnish alternative,
satisfying oppositions that can support a dramatic structure. Yet the idealist account
of the tragic sublime is not wholly unsuited to early modern tragedy because it
emerges, in part, from the efforts of reformers and counter-reformers to worry over
much the same contradiction of reason that Kant identified in his second antinomy.
As M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern have argued, it is not hard to perceive a Lutheran
paradox (“The more enslaved the body, the freer the soul”) behind idealist accounts
of the tragic sublime like Schelling’s.156 This should not surprise us, as Schelling
trained with his close friends Hegel and Hölderlin at the Lutheran seminary of
Tübingen. But accounts of the tragic sublime that emerge from a Lutheran prefer-
ence for paradox, reversals of value, and in-foldings may be better suited to Lutheran
Trauerspiel than counter-reformation tragedy.
“Everything that is original appears not in its original strength, not truly, but
genuinely only in its weakness . . . ; when [nature] presents itself in its strongest gift,
the sign = 0,” says Hölderlin in his well-known (and typically Lutheran) formulation,
though one that he wishes to apply to Attic tragedy.157 The Jesuits, in contrast,
accepted the Thomist position that in life men should attempt to harmonize their
reason, their sensuous appetite, and their body, and they looked to their solemn

155 Filippi (2006) 520.    156 Silk and Stern (1981) 308.
157 Hölderlin, “The Significance of Tragedy” in Bernstein, ed. (2003) 193.
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Counter-Reformation Tragedy 251

tragedies to provide audiences with the training that their passions, which partook
of both the body and the soul, required for that end. Although Molinism furnishes
counter-reformation dramatists with the metaphysical basis of a tragic dramaturgy
that can uphold both free will and grace, foresight and providence, as Schulze
­observes, it does not support a dramaturgy of paradox and inversion so much as
one of exploration, exercise, and the mysterious convergence of the human and
divine in some terminus. If, in Lutheran-inspired accounts, the tragic sublime
turns on synchronic paradoxes that seem to be illuminated by a sudden flash of
lightning—the death of the hero is the sign of absolute being—Molinist tragedy,
with its diachronic concatenation of free will, circumstance, and God’s middle
knowledge of futurabilia, can produce effects more akin to the mathematical sub-
lime, whether they are achieved through a wondrous convergence in time or an
admirable suspension of human time sub specie aeternitas.
In Nietzsche’s idealized and influential account of Greek tragedy, “the Apollinian
illusion” at last “reveals itself as what it really is—the veiling during the perform-
ance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian effect.”158 The Jesuits, in contrast, begin
from the premise that tragedy is an imitation “exhibiting meter, and music, and
dance separately,” and they interpret this to license a range of dramatic forms in
which the performing arts are used severally or in conjunction, harmoniously or
in counter-point. The result is often a drama with intermedi or a declaimed tragedy
intercalated with a tragic opera or pantomime ballet on a related theme. At a
redacted performance of Crispus staged at the Seminario Romano in 1628, for
example, spectacular allegorical prologues preceded each act. Fortune descended
from the heavens on her wheel before Act 1, revealing Trumpery, Envy, and Fury
with their lances turned on Crispus. To demonstrate her power, she transformed
her wheel into the world and then into a little cloud that disappeared. Before Act
2, in which Constantine Minor reveals his emulous rivalry with his half-brother
Crispus, Envy begged Pluto for a troupe of Furies. Then Trumpery and his com-
panions danced a ballet of feints and deceptions before the third act in which
Fausta and her eunuch stage her drama of offended virtue. Before Act 4, in which
Crispus returns to Rome with his troops, who are eager to settle the matter
with arms, a Fury descended to the cave of Vulcan, where the Cyclopes sounded
their hammers and sang. And before the final act, Tibur appeared on a conch shell
accompanied by a chorus of singers and musicians to celebrate the triumph of
Crispus—only to plunge into grief at the news of his death.159 When the Jesuits
staged Polyeucte at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in 1679, they intercalated a panto-
mime ballet on the same subject composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier; and
when they performed Étienne Chamillard’s Latin tragedy Saul in 1688, they com-
menced with the prologue to François Bretonneau and Charpentier’s tragédie en
musique David et Jonathas, then performed an act of Saul, then returned to the
tragédie en musique, thus creating an alternation of action and lyric reflection, dec-
lamation and song. If Nietzsche insists on a tragic cadence in which illusion is
dissolved in an orgiastic frenzy, the Jesuits perceive stage spectacles, balletic

158 Nietzsche (1967) 129–30.    159 For the full scenario, see Filippi (2001) 113–18.
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252 What Was Tragedy?

­ isplays, and dramatic music not as illusions but as outward and sensuous signs
d
of spiritual truths.
Nietzsche’s account of the sacrifice of the Dionysian hero is in turn bound up
with a narrative in which the death of the individual prepares for the birth of a
national spirit. As we have seen, the Jesuits also had a robust theory of tragedy as
a school of liberty, but they did not so readily identify individual liberty with
the nation-state. Molina’s theological concept—in which man “does not appear
as a passively receptive object of the divine will but as an actively cooperating
subject—as God’s creature who from his own willpower and decision accepts the
will of God and acts as his agent”—brings in its train “a socio-metaphysical con-
cept,” as Frank Costello observes, that stresses “the social and political autonomy
of man in his role as a citizen.”160 In their accounts of the origin of political authority,
prominent Jesuit theologians—Molina, Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suárez—argue
that there is only one form of government by natural law, direct democracy. All
other forms of government are sanctioned by the law of nations, not nature, and
are created when the people transfer their political authority to kings, consuls, or
other magistrates, reserving the prerogative to limit the type, extent, and duration
of the powers transferred. It should be assumed, says Molina, that the people retain
the right to reject laws which they find burdensome and that in cases when they
dare not exercise that power, it is because the king has increased his power through
force and without their consent. Although the Jesuit Juan de Mariana was extreme
in saying that a king who violated the laws of the realm concerning religion, suc-
cession, or taxes could be killed by any private citizen, even moderates such as
Molina allow for robust resistance to tyrants. While such theories led Leopold
Ranke to declare the Jesuits the first to produce a general theory of popular rights,
we must concede that they co-existed in practice with support of absolute monarchs,
a discourse of reason of state, and justifications of religious persecution rather than
toleration.161 There is, in short, nothing ideologically innocent or straightforward
about the celebration of liberty in counter-reformation tragedy, but it does at least
underline how contrived, how ideological, how historically contingent is the more
familiar idealist and romantic mapping of a transcendental moral liberty—affirmed
by the tragic sublime—on the emerging nation-state.
It is little wonder that literary history has lost sight of the Jesuit repertoire. It is
dedicated to an ideal of counter-reformation tragedy that the modern philosophy of
the tragic often, though not invariably, declares tautological. It is founded on a moral
psychology of manners and passions that satisfies neither readers who bring the
expectations of Shakespearean character criticism to texts, nor those who, like
Nietzsche, spurn the Euripidean representation of passionate man. It aspires to revive
some of the most “decadent” performance practices of Hellenistic Greece and Rome,
and, what may be more distasteful to many readers, it seeks to revive the grandeur of
Rome in order to advance the ambitions of the counter-reformation papacy. Rather
than national, it is transnational, even global. All these qualities make it intractable to
our traditional literary histories, but that is precisely why we must rewrite them.

160 Costello (1974) 13.    161 Ranke (1872); Höpfl (2004).

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A P P E N D I X TO C H A P T E R 5

Excerpts from Stefonio’s Crispus

(1) 1.230–4.
Malus daemon. Sic, sic feratur: mater incestis flagret
impura flammis, stillet insonti rubens
cruore mucro, sordeat luctu pater,
iuvenis triumphis clarus indigne occidat,
ululata caedes urbe funesta sonet.
Evil Demon. Yes, yes, let it be done. Let the impure mother burn with incestuous flames.
Let the red sword’s edge drip with innocent blood. Let the father be squalid with grief. Let
the youth, famous in his triumph, fall undeservedly. Let the slaughter pour forth howls of
grief in the funereal city.

(2) 4.98–100, 107–41, 183–90, 199–206.

Constantinus imperator.
Abscede testis, arbitro sedes vacet.
Mecum ipse lamentabor aerumnas meas.
Certe hic querilis aptus est nostris locus.
* * *
Crispe, quo patrem rapis?
Quo me resorbet pristini sensus calor?
Quamquam severus pectora obstrinxit rigor
et te cruentas poscit ad poenas reum,
pietas rebellat: ira decedit loco
et iam refracta turgidas ponit minas
paterque totus iudice eiecto redit.
Egone ut tuorum, Crispe, meritorum memor,
tuo cruore taminem patrias manus?
Sit iusta quamvis poena, crudelis potest
tamen videri: dedecet certe patrem
et te meorum, Cripse, votorum modo
mensura felix. Crispe, quo patrem vocas?
O sors acerba, iudicem nato patrem,
natum parenti iudici statuis reum?
Haec una potior visa ludendi via
et cum superbo sceptra calcares pede,
erat hac petendus Caesar? Hac tantum patet?
Quem vulnerares feceram certe locum
alibi: abstineres saeva vel saltem hinc manus.
Quidquid renascens, quidquid emoriens dies
collustrat, orbe quicquid immenso iacet,
mihi servit uni. Quidlibet ferias, meum
est vulnus: uni perditur quidquid perit.
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254 What Was Tragedy?

Ubique telis, Caesar, occurrit tuis.
Quodcumque tanges, Caesarem tanges. Patet
uni, quod uni paret. Hanc urbem, has opes,
haec regna late fusa per mundi plagas
mea membra feci. Laede quodcumque hinc libet,
mea membra laedis. Omnium clades mea est.
Quin mihi sit idem, nullus est usquam miser.
Quoscumque luctus commoves, nostros moves.
Cur potius una hac, saeva, grassaris via?
Hac parte clades aggredi mundi libet?
Hic ego vererer? Memet hac opponerem?
* * *
Erit ut theatris syrma spectetur meum?
Fabula nepotum Caesar infelix ero
et te tragoedus, Crispe, plorabit reum
et me parentem iudicem? Dicar pater
mactasse natum? Crispe, diceris patrem
mersisse luctu? Cladis infandae, efferae,
Thyeste dignae et Atreo—o superum fidem—
documenta Constantinus et Crispus dabunt?
* * *
Summe proh rerum Sator,
in haec facinora labis infandae pudor
simulatus ibat? Ibat in thalamos patris?
Hoc instruebat facinus incestus furor?
Heu rapior aestu rursus et iustas dolor
vires resumit inque vindictae impetum
iudex revolvor saevus excluso patre.
Moriatur.

Emperor Constantine. Go away witness, let the place be free of any judge. I myself, with
myself, will lament my troubles. Certainly, this place is suited to my complaints. . . . Crispus,
whither are you carrying away your father? Whither does the passion of my old feeling draw
me? Although a grim rigor has constricted my chest and demands that you be answerable
to bloody penalties, love fights back. Anger leaves its place, and, already broken, puts aside
its wild threats, and your father returns entirely. The judge in me is cast out. Should I,
Crispus, as one mindful of your merits, stain a father’s hands with your blood? Even though
the punishment be just, it can seem cruel nevertheless. It certainly does not suit a father,
and you, Crispus, just now the happy extent of my prayers, Crispus, whither are you calling
your father? O bitter fortune! Do you make a father judge of his son, a son defendant while
his father is judge? Did this one way seem more amusing, and when you were trampling
scepters with a haughty foot, did Caesar have to be attacked this way? Is this the only open
road? Certainly, I would have offered you a place to wound elsewhere. Couldn’t you at least,
savage one, have held back your hand from this? Whatever the reborn, whatever the dying
day illumines, whatever lies in the huge world serves me alone. Wherever you strike, mine
is the wound. Whatever perishes is lost to me alone. Everywhere Caesar runs into your
weapons. No matter what you touch, you will touch Caesar. What obeys one man, lies open
to one man. This city, these resources, these kingdoms spread across the broad regions of the
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Excerpts from Stefonio’s Crispus 255

world I have made my limbs. Wound whatever you please from this place, it is my limbs
you wound. The murder of all is my own. But if the same thing happens to me, no one
anywhere is wretched. Whatever griefs you stir, you stir my own. Why do you go all the
more, savage one, on this path? Does it please you to proceed thus to the destruction of the
world? Was I reverent for this? I opposed myself for this? . . . Will it be that my tragedy will
be watched in theaters? Will I, unhappy Caesar, be a plot-line for my grandchildren?
Will the tragedian weep over both you, Crispus, as the accused, and me, the father and
judge? Will I be said, as a father, to have put my son to death? Crispus, will you be said to
have buried your father with grief? Will Constantine and Crispus give examples of disaster,
unspeakable, savage, worthy of Thyestes and Atreus—O favor of the gods! . . . Oh highest
father of the world, was a feigned modesty moving towards these deeds of unspeakable pol-
lution? Was it moving against his father’s bedchamber? Was an incestuous madness plan-
ning this crime? Alas! I am seized again by rage, and anger takes back its justified strength,
and as a savage judge I am turned back to the sway of vengeance. The father is thrust aside.
Let him die.

(3) 4.450–62
Crispus. Deprensa, Crispe, pinus haud dubie tua
iactatur undis. Errat instabili aestuans
commissa ligno tenuis et fragilis salus
per caeca saxa vecta, per Syrtes truces.
Excutere. Non est vanus hoc caelo metus.
Te recipe, Crispe: propius et maius tumet
metu periclum, fervet iratum mare
et mole vasta funditus fluctus ciet.
Nec solitus horror incubat fessae rati,
ubi si quis error consili lumen premat,
aut si relicto fluctuet clavo pavens
animo magister, condat et caeli iubar,
iactura summae fiat.
Crispus. Without doubt, your ship, Crispus, having been caught, is tossed about by the
waves: wavering, entrusted to unstable wood, your salvation is in doubt, fragile and slight,
carried over unseen rocks, over cruel shoals. You are tossed out. Fear is not baseless under
this sky. Recover yourself, Crispus. The danger swells nearer and more abundantly through
fear. The irate sea seethes, and with a vast weight it summons waves from the depths. An
uncanny horror oppresses the weary ship, where, if any error in deliberation should put out
the light, or if the helmsman, fearing in his mind, should abandon the rudder and be
wavering, and suppress the shining light of heaven, all would be lost.

(4) 4.482–92
Crispus. Lucis Repertor aurae, mentis iubar,
sub quo recurrunt arbitro rerum vices,
cui famula regi floreum subdit caput
baccata circum terra frondosis iugis,
quem signa picti lucida observant poli,
ventosa vasti regna quem ponti pavent
et tu salutis ara, tu caeli lepor,
tu lucis almae Mater et mundi decor,
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256 What Was Tragedy?

rege fluctuantem, Mater et tandem tuum
numen serena. Magna sint quamvis mala,
leviter feremus viribus freti tuis.
Crispus. Origin of golden light, splendor of the mind, under whose direction things recur
each time, to whom the earth, full of fruits all over her leafy mountains, as a maid to a re-
gent, bows her head; you, whom the bright constellations of the embroidered sky obey,
whom the windy realms of the vast sea fear; you, altar of salvation, you, charm of the sky,
you, Mother of nurturing light and beauty of the world; Mother, give direction to one who
is wandering at sea, and, at last, make bright your divine will. Confident in your strength,
lightly we will endure great things, however bad.

(5) 5.682–90
Constantine. Heu parce, nate, parce, quod castum ac sacrum
nefastus, execrandus attrecto pater.
Hic ille Crispus? Consul hic ille est meus?
Haec illa species oris? Hic vultus decor?
Hoc sidus illud, frontis augustae iubar?
Hic geminus ille fulgor oculorum? Hic lepor?
Haec illa cervix? Caesar, agnoscis genus?
En pasce visus, pasce, crudelis pater,
opus hoc cruentae dexterae cernis tuae?
Constantine. Alas! forgive, son, forgive that I, sinful and cursed father, touch what is holy
and chaste. Is this that Crispus? Is this that consul of mine? Is this that beauty of his face?
This that grace of his countenance? Is this the star, that the radiance of his majestic brow?
This that twin brightness of his eyes? This the charm? This that neck? Look, feed on the
sight, feed on it, cruel father. Do you see this work of your blood-stained hand?

(6) 5.730–54.
Constantinus imperator. Mole collapsa fluit
examine corpus, disperit frontis decus
et dubia cervix languet et languent genae;
ut illa regnis docta moderandis manus,
heu gelida languet. Mundus his nixus modo
humeris sedebat? Ensis hac fulgens manu
rotatus ipso ex praelio pacem tulit?
Hac tot duces, tot regna, tot reges iacent?
Hic ille terror gentium? Hic Crispus meus?
Chorus. Heu, heu, heu, heu, heu, heu, heu, heu.
Ducis indigni decus heu raptum,
ducis immeriti funus acerbum.
Constantinus imperator. Non tu superba sceptra Romana potens
gestabis aula, nate, quod vetuit pater.
Non iura populis, iura non Romae dabis,
non regna Pori victa, non Mauri trahes
sparsosque campis horridos vastis Getas.
Non tu Sicambros sub tuum mittes iugum
hominumque Morinos ultimos, non tu Scythas,
non tu rigentes Sarmatas, no tu Dahas
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Excerpts from Stefonio’s Crispus 257

audax sequeris, nobiles turmas agens.
O dulce pignus, columen o lapsae domus,
o luctus Helenae matris, o moeror patris,
o vulnus orbae filiae, o Romae dolor
moestumque funus gentium, o crimen meum.
Emperor Constantine. The lifeless body sinks, its strength having collapsed. The beauty of
his brow has perished, and the wavering neck droops, and his cheeks droop; and that hand,
trained in restraining kingdoms—alas! cold—droops. Was the world just now resting,
relying on these shoulders? Did the shining sword, brandished by this hand, bring out
peace from battle itself? By this hand, do so many generals, so many kingdoms, so many
kings lie low? Is this that terror of the nations? Is this my Crispus?
Chorus. O! O! O! O! O! O! O! O! Alas the glory of the undeserving general snatched
away! Bitter death of the undeserving general!
Emperor Constantine. You will not wield the proud scepter, powerful in the Roman
palace, son; your father prohibited that. You will not give laws to the nations; you will not
give laws to Rome. You will not bring together the conquered kingdoms of India, nor of
Africa, nor the rough Getae, scattered on vast plains. You will not place the Sicambrians and
the Morini, farthest of men, under your yoke. You will not boldly pursue the Scythians, nor
the cold Sarmatians, nor the Dahae, driving your noble troops. O sweet promise! O prop
of a fallen home! O lamentation of my mother Helen! O father’s grief! O wound of my
­bereft daughter! O pain of Rome and grieving ruin of the nations! O my crime!
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6
History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design
Where Shakespeare and Dryden Part Company

Ever since Ben Jonson published his tribute “To the memory of my beloved, The
Author Mr. William Shakespeare” in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works
(1623), declaring that “Nature her selfe was proud of his designes,” critics have
tried to put their finger on what sets Shakespeare apart from other tragedians.1
The first peculiarity, which is consistently agreed upon by all observers from the
Elizabethans to the romantics, is that his plays are “neither right comedies, nor
right tragedies” but “representations of history, without any decorum.”2 To the
critics who find fault with Shakespeare on this ground—such as the Italian visitor
whom John Florio imagines visiting England’s public theaters in 1591, or the
Lisideius of John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667), or Thomas Rymer in
The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d and Examined by the Practice of the Ancients
(1678)—Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries who wrote history plays
did not lay the foundations of their designs as deeply as the ancients, who had
demonstrated “that History, grosly taken, was neither proper to instruct, nor apt to
please; and therefore would not trust History for their examples, but refin’d upon
the History; and thence contriv’d something more philosophical and more accurate
than History.”3 As a good Aristotelean, Rymer knew that the undigested facts of
history could not possibly yield a tragedy that would satisfy the demand for veri-
similitude, probability, and beauty, all of which dictated that the fable of a tragedy
should be one and complete, that its parts should be beautifully arranged, and that
its action should be extensive enough to include a probable change of fortune
while remaining small enough to permit the mind to retain it as a whole.
But by the time he published his seminal essay on Shakespeare in 1777, a
decade after the actor-manager David Garrick had transformed Shakespeare into
a poet of international renown by orchestrating a Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon,
Johann Gottfried Herder was prepared to make a positive case for the organiza-
tion of Shakespeare’s plays by arguing that they emerged from and embodied
different historical conditions than those which had obtained in classical Athens.
Shakespeare “took history as he found it,” announced Herder with satisfaction,
claiming that the “changes of time and place, over which the poet rules, proclaim
most loudly: ‘This is not a poet but a creator! Here is the history of the world!’ ”4

1 Jonson (1623).   2 Florio (1591) 23.    3 Rymer (1678)15–16.

4 Herder, “Shakespeare” (1773) in Nisbet, ed. (1985) 168, 170–1.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 259

A second, interrelated observation is that Shakespeare does not compose by

“rules of artful construction.”5 When critics find fault with him for this reason,
they say that he has no “design” in his “designs,” implicitly invoking Aristotle’s com-
parison of a tragedy to a drawing (Poetics 1450b1–4)—and more often than not
the renaissance interpretation of this passage, which stresses the superiority of dis-
egno to naive naturalism.6 The difference between design and naturalism, imitation
and representation, is that in the former the artist transcends the order of history
and fallen nature, putting himself in the position of God at the creation, when he
contemplated himself, reflected on his own excellencies, and then “drew, and con-
stituted the first Forms, which are call'd Ideas.”7 This is no easy feat. “The great
Painters only are capable of a great design in their drafts, such as Raphael, a Julius
Romanus, a Poussin,” says the Jesuit René Rapin,
and only great Poets are capable of a great Subject in their Poetry. An indifferent Wit
may form a vast design in his Imagination, but it must be an extraordinary Genius
that can work this design, and fashion it according to justness and proportion. For, ’tis
necessary that the same Spirit reign throughout, that all contribute to the same end,
and that all the parts bear a secret relation to each other, all depend on this relation
and alliance; and this general design is nothing else but the Form which a poet gives to
his Work.8
But by the latter half of the eighteenth century, it became common among
Shakespeare’s advocates to dismiss critics like Rapin and Rymer as “mechanists in
criticism, who have no other way of judging, but by applying rule and compass; like
ancient gardeners, who trimmed their forest-trees into cones and cylinders, and
reduced winding brooks to square canals.”9 Contrasts between the long vistas and
formal symmetry of French parterres and the winding paths and craggy oaks of
English landscape gardens, between Racine and Shakespeare, were soon reinforced
by the distinction between mechanic and organic form, which overturned the
earlier valorization of disegno and reduced the mechanic beauties, which had been
a manifestation of beautiful design, into evidence of mass production and slavish
imitation. Appealing to the living principle, romantic critics asked readers to dis-
regard the traditional canon of beauty and look for dynamic processes and signs
of life in Shakespeare’s multiple plots, his appropriation of sources verbatim, and
his practice of “creating” and “evolving” even in mid-sentence, “just as a serpent
moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and
untwisting on its own strength.”10 Both the life and the unifying principle in
Shakespeare’s dramas could be found, they concluded, first and foremost in his
characters, who possessed the freedom to develop and find their own form. Like
the individuals in an ideally constituted organic state, Shakespeare’s characters

5 Griffith (1775) 26.    6 Rymer (1678) 16.

7 Parallel, of Poetry and Painting (1695) in Dryden (1956–89) 20: 40. Dryden is quoting and
translating Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s introduction to his 1672 Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors, and
Architects (Le vite de’ pittori, scvltori et architetti moderni). On the concept of the “idea” in art, see
Panofsky (1968).
8 Rapin (1694 [1674]) 26–7.    9 Griffith (1775) 26.
10 Table Talk in Coleridge (1969–) 14.1: 464.
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260 What Was Tragedy?

were ends in themselves capable of self-direction, even though they were also
parts of a whole.
I want to dwell on these distinctions between history and artifice, development
and design, because they help to explain not only why Shakespeare’s dramatic
method provoked critical resistance for two centuries but why it seems to us,
as inheritors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ turn to a philosophy of
history, so effective in dramatizing life in its tragic aspect. Shakespeare’s Antony
and Cleopatra (1606–7) commends itself to my purposes because it finds Shakespeare
closely following Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Gre-
cians and Romans (1579), a work that Shakespeare first used extensively in Julius
Caesar (1599), on the brink of his tragic period. Shakespearean tragedy is scarcely
conceivable without the Lives, for in them Shakespeare found narratives that
were written by an author profoundly influenced by Greek tragedy, histories that
were co-terminal with the lives of their leading figures, and lives that made his-
tory even as they were directed and cut short by inexorable historical forces. If
ever Shakespeare “made poetry the organ of history, and assumed a certain tone
of character and sentiment, in conformity to facts known, instead of trusting to
his observations of general nature or to the unlimited indulgence of his fancy,” it
was, as William Hazlitt observes, in Antony and Cleopatra, for there is scarcely
any play, concurs Coleridge, in which Shakespeare “has followed history more
minutely.”11
Dryden’s claim to originality in All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1677) rests
on his thorough reconception of the same tragic theme according to Aristotelean
and Racinian principles of design. When critics compare these plays, they usually
do so only as “a way of setting off the character of the Shakespearean genius,” and
they predictably find that whereas Shakespeare’s characters “have a life corres-
ponding to the life of the verse,” Dryden’s tragic persons “exist only in a world of
stage postures,” that whereas Shakespeare’s poetry is the “product of a realizing
imagination working from within a deeply and minutely felt theme,” Dryden’s is
the result of “a highly skilled craftsman, working at his job from the outside.”12
Those critics who admire Dryden’s achievement tend to avoid comparisons,
­arguing that they raise false expectations that Dryden never meant to satisfy.13
The point is a valid one, yet the fact remains that common readers do routinely
measure other early modern tragedians against the standard of Shakespeare. My
aim is to account for the differences between Antony and Cleopatra and All for Love
in terms that would have been legible to their contemporaries and that can also
account for the response of common readers today. My analysis confirms many of
the local claims that the romantic critics make when seeking to describe the pecu-
liar genius of Shakespeare. But it also insists that Dryden’s play is a masterpiece on
its own terms, terms that can be reconstructed from Dryden’s extensive critical

11 Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817) in Hazlitt (1996) 115; Coleridge (1989) 176.
12 Leavis (1975) 153, 151.
13 The most successful attempt to disentangle Dryden’s play from Shakespeare’s may be found in
Maximillian Novak’s critical introduction in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 363–89. Also see Milhous and
Hume (1985) ch. 4.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 261

output and that should, in turn, serve as a guide to the greater part of tragedies
produced before 1800.
By writing as a “historian,” Shakespeare creates a drama that (1) satisfies our
criteria for truth-claims by reproducing the particulars and the occlusions of his-
tory; that (2) can support analyses that turn on character and conflict, even though
these critical concepts are products of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and
that (3) subjects us to the theatrical experience of enduring being through time. By
writing as a “poet” rather than a “historian,” Dryden achieves verisimilitude rather
than realism. He offers the audience a retrospective distillation in which the hero
is at times the perceiver and at times the point where all the sight lines converge.
As a result, we frequently feel that Dryden may be working with the clear designs
of a Poussin in mind, or that Antoine Coypel might have transformed All for Love
into history paintings as easily as he did Racine’s plays (Fig. 6.1). Dryden’s Aristo-
teleanism does not stop, however, at the Poetics. He also accepts the premise that
politics must determine the ends of tragedy because it is the architectonic science
that rules over all the other arts in a polity (Nichomachean Ethics 1094a18–b11).
For Dryden, that implied that tragedy should produce an affective disposition in
English subjects that was compatible with monarchy.14
Developments since Dryden’s day dispose us to identify history with tragedy
and tragedy with history, a habit of thought that has helped to ensure Shakespeare’s
preeminence in the early modern canon. Becoming more self-conscious about our
identification of truth with history and of historical process with the experience
of the tragic need not diminish our wonder at Shakespeare’s achievement. But it
should permit us to see Dryden’s more clearly.

A N TO N Y A N D C L E O PAT R A A S A G R E AT O C C U R R E N C E

Whereas Sophocles was able to write plots that embodied a “simple spirit of his-
tory, story, action,” Shakespeare, says Herder, found nothing like this simplicity of
character in his own culture. He “took history as he found it, and his creative spirit
combined the most various stuff into a wondrous whole” that cannot properly be
called a “plot in the Greek sense” but should instead be referred to “by the middle-
period term ‘action,’ or by the modern term ‘event’ (événement), ‘great occurrence.’ ”15
The distinction is a valuable one, for it pinpoints one of Dryden’s objections to
Shakespeare. In An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667), Lisideius complains that
Shakespeare’s history plays “are rather so many Chronicles of Kings, or the business
many times of thirty or forty years, crampt into a representation two hours and an
half, which is not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature,
to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and
receive her Images not only much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life.”
14 The superiority of politics to poetry is routinely asserted in commentaries on the Poetics. See, for
example, Piccolomini (1575) 4–7; Sassetti (1575–76?) fol. 82v–83; Weinberg (1961) 574–5; Rapin
(1694 [1674]) 10.
15 Herder, “Shakespeare” (1773) in Nisbet, ed. (1985) 168.
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262 What Was Tragedy?

Fig. 6.1. Antoine Coypel, Athalie Chased from the Temple (before 1697), suggested by
Racine’s tragedy, Athalie (1690). The frequency with which painters and tragedians treat the
same subjects suggests the profound similarity between tragedy and painting perceived by
theorists and artists before 1800, for both were bound to obey a strict compass of time and
place. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.
Photo: Erich Lessing /Art Resource, NY.

Two points bear stress. First, Lisideius equates truth with verisimilitude and distin-
guishes it from the particulars of history, declaring such plays ridiculous because
“the Spirit of man cannot be satisfied but with truth, or at least verisimility.”16 And
second, he assumes that a well-designed tragedy should be conceived in visual,
­rather than temporal, terms. The dialogue form of the Essay means that neither
Lisideius (the champion of French neoclassicism) nor any of the other interlocu-
tors speaks for Dryden, but, in this case, Dryden seems to have concurred, for he
makes the same complaint in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), which
he probably wrote while awaiting the production of All for Love. A tragedy, says
Dryden, “must be one or single, that is, it must not be a History of one Mans
life. . . . This condemns all Shakespears Historical Plays.”17
Nicholas Rowe was also struck by Shakespeare’s refusal to confine himself to a
single action, remarking that in all the plays taken “from the English or Roman
History,” one finds “the Character as exact in the Poet as the Historian” and that
“so far from proposing to himself any one Action for a Subject,” Shakespeare often

16 Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) in Dryden (1956–89) 17: 36.

17 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 229–30.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 263

entitles his plays “lives.” This latitude leaves Shakespeare free to span decades and
traverse the globe. As Rowe observed in 1709, after assigning scene divisions to
Antony and Cleopatra for the first time in its editorial history, the action comprises
ten years, and the “Scene travels over the greatest Part of the Roman Empire,” jour-
neying restlessly between Alexandria, Rome, Messina, Misenum, Syria, Athens,
and Actium in forty-two scenes that require two hundred entrances and exits of
thirty-nine dramatis personae.18
The play’s language never lets us forget that a moiety of world is at stake in the
action.19 As a triumvir, Antony is “the triple pillar of the world” (1.1.12).20 If
Octavius Caesar knew “what hoop” could hold him “staunch” with Antony “from
edge to edge / O’th’ world,” he would pursue it (2.2.122–3). Could Pompey but
countenance an act of treachery when he has the triumvirs on his boat, he might
be rid of “these three world-sharers” (2.7.71). Wars betwixt husband and brother,
laments Octavia, “would be / As if the world should cleave” (3.4.30–1). But in the
end, Antony and Caesar cannot “stall together / In the whole world” (5.1.39–40).
Distance becomes a measure of Cleopatra’s limitless desire and a proof of Caesar’s
inescapable influence. For Cleopatra will send a “several greeting” from Egypt to
Antony each day he is away, or she’ll “unpeople Egypt” (1.5.81–2); while Caesar
has “eyes upon” Antony everywhere (3.6.63). “His affairs come to me on the
wind,” he assures his sister Octavia (3.6.63). No matter where Antony is, one of his
partners—Octavius, Cleopatra, or Octavia—is trying to maintain control of him
from afar.21
On this public stage, there are few occasions for soliloquies or pillow talk. We
watch Antony and Cleopatra from a distance with the rest of the public.22 Their
courtship commences with a public performance when the queen appears on the
river Cydnus like Venus with her entourage of Nereids and Cupids. Even Enobarbus
abandons his usual satiric banter for tones of wonder:
The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthroned i’th’ market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th’air, which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra, too,
And made a gap in nature. (2.2.223–8)
Once Antony and Cleopatra are united in love, they mark the progress of their
affair with similar occasional performances. It incenses Octavius (who is always
referred to as Caesar in the play) that they appear in the market-place of Alexandria,
where Cleopatra dresses in the habiliments of Isis, and Antony proclaims their sons
to be the kings of kings. “This in the public eye?” asks Maecenas incredulously.
“I’th’ common showplace” (3.6.11–12). If they would not make such a public
spectacle of their disregard for Rome’s glory, Caesar seems to imply, he might be

18 Rowe, ed. (1714) 1: xxviii.    19 Kermode (2000) 218.

20 All quotations are from Shakespeare (1995) hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
21 Critics have long noted that “even the distances traversed by fleets and armies” enhance the
“impressiveness” of the story. See Bradley (1941) 290; Mack (1993) 210–11.
22 On the public nature of the play, see Mack (1993) 198–9, 204–5.
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264 What Was Tragedy?

prepared to look the other way. But they are incapable of imagining or admiring
each other as private citizens: “Say the firm Roman to Great Egypt sends” (1.5.45);
“Since my lord / Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra” (3.13.191–2).23 Antony
cannot even take Cleopatra in his arms without conjuring up the world to bear
witness:
The nobleness of life
Is to do thus, when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless. (1.1.37–41)
The timescale of Antony and Cleopatra contributes as much to the impression of
greatness as the geographic extent of its action does. The play condenses the histor-
ical events of a decade, and the recollections of the persons who make its high
events extend its scope further still. Cleopatra is “wrinkled deep in time” (1.5.30),
and the “memory of [her] womb” (3.13.168) includes the progeny of Octavius
Caesar’s adoptive father, Julius. Caesar has been anticipating that his victory will
usher in a “time of universal peace” (4.6.5), an escape from history, while Antony’s
guards seem to regard the death of their leader as the end of history. “The star is
fallen,” “And time is at his period,” they declare (4.14.107–8). Whereas a play like
Oedipus the Tyrant hastens “with the greatest artifice” through places where some
delay might naturally be caused in order to “complete in one day an imitation
of that tragic action,” Antony and Cleopatra makes the experience of duration
intensely personal.24 Time may be a great gap to sleep out, a fleeting chance to
grasp, or pure suffering if you have lived too long. In the end, the play gives each
of its persons his or her own day. “The long day’s task is done / And we must sleep”
(4.14.35–6). “I must perforce / Have shown to thee such a declining day / Or look
on thine” (5.1.37–9). “The bright day is done / And we are for the dark” (5.2.192–3).
Rather than respect the artificial day of the poets, Antony and Cleopatra presents
whole lives as days. This is an effect that could only be achieved in a theater like
the aptly named Globe, for it depends on the effective use of a flexible playing
space reminiscent of the medieval platea, which could represent the entire world.
It is not an effect that Dryden could have striven for, even had he wanted to, in the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with its proscenium frame, raked stage, and moveable
perspective sets.

T H E A RT O F P O RT R A I T U R E

Dryden is the first critic in the English language to use the word “character” to
refer to a person in a play, but his deference to Aristotle and Horace leads him to
stress that the manners of all the persons in a play should be apparent and distinct

23 On such third-person references to self in Shakespeare, see Viswanathan (1969).

24 Robortello (1548) 50.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 265

and thus to rate Ben Jonson even more highly than Shakespeare as a creator of
characters.25 Not until Alexander Pope’s preface to The Works of Shakespear (1725)
do we find something closer to our modern valuation of Shakespeare’s achieve-
ment: “His Characters are so much Nature her self, that ’tis a sort of injury to call
them by so distant a name as Copies of her. . . . Every single character in Shakespear
is as much an Individual as those in Life itself.”26 The fact that Pope declared
that all the characters in Shakespeare were so distinct that their speeches could
be assigned even if all their speech prefixes had been lost—and then proceeded to
reassign many of them despite their clear speech prefixes—should give us pause before
we conclude that the ideal of radical individuation sprung from Shakespeare’s head
like the fully formed Athena and was instantly grasped by his wondering onlookers.
But Shakespeare’s decision to throw his lot in with Plutarch as a student of ēthos
rather than with Aristotle and Horace did prove consequential for dramatic
history.
For Plutarch, the ēthos of a man was an essential part of his life, and discerning
it was one of the duties that set life-writing apart from standard historiography.27
The imperative to understand a man’s ēthos (or his “manners and disposition,” as
North translates the word) meant that even the most inconsequential words or
deeds could be worth recording, for
a light occasion, a word, or some sporte makes mens naturall dispositions and maners
appeare more plane, then the famous battells wonne. . . . For as painters or drawers of
pictures, which make no accompt of other partes of the bodie, do take the resem-
blaunces of the face and favor of the countenance in which consisteth the judgement
of the maners & disposition, even so they must geve us leave to seeke out the signes
and tokens of the minde only, and thereby shewe the life of either of them, referring
you unto others to write the warres, battells, and other great thinges.28
Plutarch’s comparison of his task to that of a portraitist is striking, for if he aims
to find the mind’s construction in the face, he is content to portray the mind
he perceives rather than inventing a more perfect pattern. This suggests how far
away from neo-Aristotelean theory Plutarch and Shakespeare are, for as we saw in
chapter 1, Sir William Davenant (following Sir Philip Sidney) invoked portrait
painting as a mean occupation akin to history. In keeping with his theory that play
reveals more about a man’s nature than serious activities can, Plutarch fills his Life

25 In his dedication to Rival Ladies (1664), Dryden writes, “He may be allow’d sometimes to Err,
who undertakes to move so many Characters and Humours as are requisite in a Play, in those narrow
Channels which are proper to each of them: To conduct his imaginary Persons, through so many
various Intrigues and Chances. . . . ” In his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667), he observes, “Besides
Morose, there are at least 9 or 10 different Characters and humours in the Silent Woman, all which
persons have several concernments of their own.” See Dryden (1956–89) 8: 95; 17: 61. On Jonson’s
superiority to Shakespeare as a draftsman of manners—“the manners even of the most inconsiderable
persons in his Plays are every where apparent”—see Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden
(1956–89) 13: 238.
26 Pope, preface to The Works of Shakespear (1725) in D. Nichol Smith, ed. (1963) 45.
27 For useful introductions to Plutarch’s theories of life-writing and ēthos, see Wardman (1974);
Scardigli, ed. (1995); Duff (1999).
28 Plutarch (1579) 722.
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266 What Was Tragedy?

of Marcus Antonius with anecdotes of banquets, rambles in disguise, rigged fishing

contests, games of chance, words exchanged with passing soldiers, messengers
flogged, and booty generously restored to deserters.
Shakespeare may have found Plutarch’s emphasis on the revelatory power of
the seemingly trivial reinforced by another of his favorite authors, Michel de
Montaigne. For it would appear that Shakespeare read Montaigne’s trenchant
comparison of Timon and Diogenes in preparation for writing Timon of Athens
and shortly before turning to Antony and Cleopatra. In the same essay, Montaigne
repeats and develops Plutarch’s contention that the soul is revealed in all of its
activities:
The very same minde of Caesar, we see in directing, marshalling, and setting the battle
of Pharsalia, is likewise seene to order, dispose, and contrive, idle, trifling, and amorous
devises. We judge of a horse, not only by seeing him ridden, and cunningly managed,
but also by seeing him trot, or pace; yea, if we but looke vpon him as he stands in the
stable. . . . Why shall I not judge of Alexander, . . . sitting and drinking at Table, and
talking in good company? Or if he were playing at Chesse, what string of his witte
doth not touch on his fond-childish, and time-consuming play?29
Shakespeare can assimilate the sorts of particulars that appeal to Plutarch and
Montaigne because he does not feel bound by the Aristotelean requirement that
every part of the action be indispensable to the whole. Like Plutarch, he includes
incidents that reveal ēthos even when they do not advance the action of the play.
And in contrast to Sidney, he rests content to “counterfeit only such faces as are set
before” him.30
Yet the Plutarchan conception of ēthos should not be confused with romantic
character. For it does not develop organically until it realizes its perfect form. It is a
bundle of virtues and vices bequeathed by nature; shaped, constrained, or unleashed
by custom, education, and circumstances; revealed in unguarded moments and
telling choices; but essentially stable. Antony’s life furnishes abundant particulars
that promise to reveal the nature of the man, but these are striking for nothing so
much as their contradictions. Plutarch reports that he was eager to undertake great
enterprises in his younger years; able to show constancy and patience in adversity,
even to the point of drinking from puddles and eating bark amid famine; beloved
of his troops because he exercised, ate, and drank with them on a familiar basis;
liberal to a fault; and ready to weep with pity for his wounded comrades and his
defeated enemies alike. Yet he was also prone to luxury, drunkenness, debauchery,
cruelty, and neglect. He cultivated the Asiatic manner of speech, which, “much like
his manners and life,” was “full of ostentation, foolishe bravery, and vaine ambi-
tion”; he fastened lions in traces to draw his carts; and when he traveled to the
country, he “openly in the face of the world” brought great cupboards of gold and
silver plate “as it had been the pompe or shewe of some triumph.”31 Among the

29 “Of Heraclius and Democritus” in Montaigne (1603) 164. David Quint drew this passage to
my attention.
30 Sidney (1970 [1595]) 20.
31 Plutarch, Life of Marcus Antonius in Bullough, ed. (1964) 255, 261.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 267

Romans, he adopted the dress and manners of his mythical ancestor Hercules; but
among the Greeks, he appeared like Bacchus. To romantic critics, who considered
contradictions to be evidence of the human spirit’s radical complexity, the char-
acter of a figure like Antony could only be expressed dialectically, but Plutarch is
always waiting for his ēthos to be revealed by his choices.
As the Life of Marcus Antonius progresses, we sense that Antony will have to
throw his lot in with Rome or Egypt, Octavius or Cleopatra. The choice, which is
already stark in Plutarch, is sharpened in Shakespeare.32 Caesar puts his trust in
reason, judgment, manly virtue, calculation, and policy. He admires abstemious-
ness and sobriety. He talks of weights and measures, meets and bounds, men and
arms, compacts and records. He knows that time is a precious resource, and that
history presents itself as a series of occasions to be seized. Cleopatra, on the other
hand, relies on passion, seduction, imagination, and performance. She elevates
feasting and drinking to forms of art. And she cares only for the priceless, the
boundless, the ephemeral. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite var-
iety. If Antony could decisively opt for one of these worlds, his choice might reveal
a great deal, but instead he makes resolutions that are undone by a negligence or
uxoriousness that he refuses to recognize as an essential part of his being.
Rather than attempt to reconcile Plutarch’s contradictory accounts of Antony
or to resolve them in the sort of definitive verbal synopsis that we might find in
a Theophrastan character portrait, Shakespeare reproduces the mixed reports of
fame. Antony is “the abstract of all faults / That all men follow” (1.4.9–10) according
to Caesar. But to Lepidus, “His faults, in him, seem as the spots of heaven, / More
fiery by night’s blackness; hereditary / Rather than purchased; what he cannot
change / Than what he chooses” (1.4.12–15). Cleopatra compares him to a renais-
sance perspective picture that presents one aspect from the left (a Gorgon), another
from the right (Mars), and confusion head on (2.5.116–17).
As he grapples with the ēthos of a man who is capable of resolution and hardiness
at one time and indolence and effeminacy at another, Plutarch falls back on meta-
phors of sleep, drunkenness, and forgetfulness, and Shakespeare’s Antony resorts to
similar language when he seeks to exculpate himself for sins of omission “when
poisoned hours had bound me up / From mine own knowledge” (2.2.96–7). But
for most of Antony’s men, their leader is simply not himself all the time. “Sir,
sometimes, when he is not Antony,” says Philo, “He comes too short of that great
property / Which should go with Antony” (1.1.58–60). “Had our general / Been
what he knew—himself,” observes Canidius after the Battle of Actium, “it had
gone well” (3.10.26–7). “Let that be left / Which leaves itself ” (3.11.19–20), says
Antony to his followers after he has disgraced himself by fleeing from battle. And
yet he can still complain of Caesar’s “harping on what I am, / Not what he knew
I was” (3.13.147–8). Antony’s tragedy, as he experiences it, is his inability to hold
onto the carefully cultivated ēthos that he once projected to the entire world. At the
end of his life, as he converses with his man Eros in what Hazlitt declared “one of
the finest pieces of poetry in Shakespear,” it reminds him of a vaporous cloud that

32 On the play’s binary oppositions, see Adelman (1992) 178–92.

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268 What Was Tragedy?

appears “sometime like a bear or lion, / A towered citadel, a pendent rock, / A forked
mountain, or blue promontory / With trees upon’t that nod unto the world . . .”:
“now thy captain is / Even such a body. Here I am Antony, / Yet cannot hold this
visible shape” (4.14.3–6, 12–14).33 If we can speak of Shakespeare as inventing the
modern self, or creating literary character avant la lettre, then moments like this in
which a dramatis persona tries to make sense of himself using the classical concep-
tion of ēthos and yet finds it inadequate must be central to that achievement.
In his neo-romantic account of Shakespeare, Harold Bloom has identified “self-
overhearing” as the “royal road to individuation.”34 But even before Shakespeare’s
characters can overhear themselves, they must look into themselves. Although it
is difficult to say from our historical remove, I do not believe that seventeenth-
century Europeans found their own motives, feelings, or experiences to be simple
and perspicuous. Shakespeare frequently renders that sense of opacity visible.
“Courteous lord, one word,” says Cleopatra when Antony is making his departure
from Egypt,
Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it;
Sir, you and I have loved, but there’s not it;
That you know well. Something it is I would—
Oh, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten! (1.3.89–93)
Is this mere idleness, as Antony suggests? Or is it, as Cleopatra maintains, “sweating
labour / To bear such idleness so near the heart” (1.3.95–6)? As we read Plutarch,
we often find ourselves asking similar questions, for he records speeches regardless
of whether he knows what to make of them. To Sidney’s mind, that is just the sort
of failing that the poet can avoid by eschewing history. Poets such as Corneille,
Racine, and Dryden often strive to make darkness transpicuous and the unutter-
able articulate, but that is not, I would contend, because they are insensitive to the
radical complexity of the human spirit; it is because they believe that distilling
complexity and contradiction into a plastic form that is beautiful and comprehen-
sible is the duty of a poet.
Because we now tend to think of history as an imperfect record of the real (con-
sider how many realistic novels of the eighteenth century declare themselves to
be “true histories” on their title pages), we accept the intractable particulars and
occlusions of the historical record as marks of truth-telling. Shakespeare, if any-
thing, multiplies the reality effects that he finds in the historian. In Plutarch, we
read that a soldier finding the dead Cleopatra asked angrily, “Is that well done
Charmion? Verie well sayd she againe, and meete for a Princes discended from the
race of so many noble kings. She sayd no more, but fell downe dead by the bed.”35
Like Dryden after him, Shakespeare reproduces the speeches almost verbatim, but
Shakespeare adds the mysterious exclamation: “Ah, soldier!” (5.2.327).36 What
were her final thoughts? We are in the position of the historian, faced with a record

33 Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays in Hazlitt (1903) 4: 231.

34 Bloom (1998) xvii.    35 Plutarch, Life of Marcus Antonius, in Bullough, ed. (1964) 316.
36 T. S. Eliot remarked on this change in a radio address; see Bate (1997) 175.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 269

of words and deeds that resists perspicuous analysis. In 1777, Maurice Morgann
made the influential claim that because Shakespeare’s characters were “original”
and not imitated from other authors, “it may be fit to consider them rather as
Historic than Dramatic beings; and when occasion requires, to account for their
conduct from the whole of character, from general principles, from latent motives,
and from policies not avowed.”37 The tradition of character criticism that Morgann
initiated, that A. C. Bradley crowned, and that Harold Bloom continues to this
day, was roundly attacked by L. C. Knights in his famous essay, “How Many
Children Had Lady Macbeth?”, but Shakespeare’s dramatization of the historian’s
particulars, ellipses, and contradictions does invite us to consider his persons as
historic beings in a way that the more pellucid or apparent projection of manners
and passions in an artificial order does not.38

S U B L I M I T Y R A I S E D F RO M T H E V E RY E L E M E N T S
OF LITTLENESS

Antony and Cleopatra is “by far the most wonderful” of Shakespeare’s historical
plays, as Coleridge remarks, because it achieves a tragic sublimity by means of,
­rather than in spite of, its fidelity to the historian’s particulars and the life-writer’s
anecdotes. “Great crimes, springing from high passions, grafted on high qualities,
are the legitimate source of tragic poetry,” says the nineteenth-century critic Ana
Jameson, “But to make the extreme of littleness produce an effect like grandeur—
to make the excess of frailty produce an effect like power—to heap up together all
that is most unsubstantial, frivolous, vain, contemptible, and variable, till the
worthlessness be lost in the magnitude, and a sense of the sublime spring from
the very elements of littleness,—to do this, belonged only to Shakespeare.”39 The
theatrical effect of Antony and Cleopatra is, to be sure, peculiarly Shakespearean,
but the paradoxical blend of littleness and grandeur that we find in the play finds
its origin in the Life of Marcus Antonius, for if Plutarch was a historian and a racon-
teur, he was also a mythographer; and in the Life he carefully balances the historical
and the mythical, the mimetic and the allegorical. His Antony is by turns Hercules
at the crossroads, Hercules holding the distaff of Omphale, Mars to Cleopatra’s
Venus, and Osiris to her Isis.40 In Plutarch, history is refined into myth in the
smithy of desire.
We seem far away from any such alchemy in Act 3, when the Battle of Actium
confirms everything that the Romans have been saying about Cleopatra’s ruinous
effects on Antony. But Antony and Cleopatra holds in store a remarkable series of
37 Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff in D. Nichol Smith,
ed. (1963) 231 n.1.
38 “There is no better piece of Shakespearean criticism in the world,” enthused Bradley (1903) 291 of
Morgann’s Essay. Also see Nuttall (1984) and Bloom (1998) 290–1. There has, of course, been a long line
of criticism skeptical of Morgann and Bradley. See chapter 2, n. 78 for further bibliography.
39 Jameson (1858 [1832]) 2: 122.
40 On the mythic aspects of Antony and Cleopatra, see Adelman (1992) 183–5 and Mack (1993)
214–17.
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270 What Was Tragedy?

reversals that dissolve the play’s binary oppositions. The process commences when
Antony returns from a victory by land that momentarily redeems his disgrace by
sea. All of Enobarbus’ fears of Cleopatra’s interference seem, for the moment, to
have been groundless, and the two lovers greet each other in their grandest manner:
ANTONY O thou day o’th’ world,
Chain mine armed neck! Leap thou, attire and all,
Through proof of harness to my heart, and there
Ride on the pants triumphing! [They embrace]
CLEOPATRA Lord of lords!
O infinite virtue! Com’st thou smiling from
The world’s great snare uncaught? (4.8.13–18)
Whereas Philo had lamented in the play’s opening speech that a captain’s heart,
which had “burst / The buckles on his breast” in great fights was now become “the
bellows and the fan / To cool a gipsy’s lust” (1.1.7–10), there is nothing unworthy
in the image of Cleopatra riding in triumph on it now, even when we remember
that, as an inversion of Cleopatra’s expression of desire, “O happy horse, to bear
the weight of Antony!” (1.5.21–2), it seems to place Antony in the passive pos-
ition. It has the force of a happy paradox. But four short scenes later, Antony’s fleet
deserts him, he suspects Cleopatra of treachery, and he once again declares the
imminence of his death. Alarmed to see Antony behaving like Hercules raving in
the shirt of Nessus or Ajax gone mad with grief at the loss of the arms of Achilles,
Cleopatra falls back on old tricks. She retreats to her monument, giving out word
that she has slain herself and died with the name of Antony on her lips. This is not
the first time that Cleopatra has feigned her death, as we know from Enobarbus’
jest, “I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment” (1.2.148–9). But
in the dire circumstances, Antony does not doubt the report. He falls clumsily on
his own sword, only to be informed by Diomedes that the queen lives. There is no
longer any doubt in Antony’s mind about where his priorities lie. He orders his
guards to bear him to her with a resolute spirit. The weight of Antony (which has
all along been a sign of his sexual vigor and manly strength) and the weight of woe
that his death will occasion are fast becoming one.
Cleopatra’s rhetoric, which has so often sounded full of ostentation and foolish
bravery now seems suited to the occasion as she awaits news of her lord:
All strange and terrible events are welcome,
But comforts we despise. Our size of sorrow,
Proportioned to our cause, must be as great
As that which makes it. (4.15.3–6)
With the appearance of Antony at the foot of her monument, she delivers her
anguished apostrophe to the sun—“Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in! Dark-
ling stand / The varying shore o’th’world!” (4.15.11–12)—but she is afraid to go
down to Antony lest she be taken. So she tosses ropes and chains out of the high
windows so that he may be trussed and drawn up. In Plutarch, this is the culmination
of a pattern in which Cleopatra seems to exercise an irresistible pull on Antony.
Shakespeare perceives and develops Plutarch’s pattern—“These strong Egyptian
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 271

fetters I must break” (1.2.122); “thou knewst too well my heart was to thy rudder
tied by th’strings / And thou shouldst tow me after” (3.11.56–7)—but in an inspired
stroke, he represents the terrible labor as sport: “Here’s sport indeed! How heavy
weighs my lord! / Our strength is all gone into heaviness; / That makes the weight”
(4.15.33–5).
The theatrical power of her words depends on our recollection of a whole series of
earlier exchanges, from Cleopatra’s complaint at Antony’s departure (“’Tis sweating
labour / To bear such idleness so near the heart” [1.3.95–6]), to her exclamation of
desire in his absence (“O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!” [1.5.22]), to
her proposal to wile away the time by betraying fishes with her angle (“as I draw
them up, / I’ll think them every one an Antony, / And say ‘Ah, ha! You’re caught!’ ”
[2.5.13–15]). The whole career of Antony and Cleopatra seems to be recalled in
the laborious act of pulling Antony up. Whereas the crisis tragedies of Racine and
Dryden offer us a synoptic view of an action viewed in retrospect from a point in
time, this scene relies on a chain of associations and verbal reminiscences to produce
the illusion that in recalling the theatrical presentation we are remembering a life,
with its admixture of the trivial and the momentous. In Plutarch’s account we feel
all the pathos of an idle and luxurious queen pulling with her might like a common
laborer to reclaim the one thing she really values, but in Shakespeare we sense this
and something more: the paradox that what we have deemed jest and idleness and
performance until now may have been earnest and labor and inwardness all along.
Making use of the upper stage that he had exploited so effectively in the balcony
scenes of Romeo and Juliet (1595–96), Shakespeare turns the weight of the actor’s
body—drawn up perilously by the boys playing Cleopatra and her women—into
a measure of Antony’s “huge spirit,” for we sense that only such a spirit could ani-
mate such a “case.” Antony has many times felt himself to be melting away, and
now he does so before Cleopatra’s eyes: “O see, my women, / The crown o’th’ earth
doth melt” (4.15.64–5). Then, as Cleopatra leans over Antony, she utters a remark-
able speech in which she herself becomes the moon hovering above the terrestrial
globe, though her personal identification with the “fleeting” planet (5.2.239–40)
becomes explicit only when she finally rejects it: “the odds is gone / And there is
nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon” (4.15.68–70). As Cleopatra
prepares, “To do that thing that ends all other deeds, / Which shackles accidents
and bolts up change” (5.2.5–6), she begins to resemble Isis, especially as she pieces
together the scattered remnants of her lost lord in the hearing of Dollabella: “His
face was as the heavens, . . . / his voice was propertied / As all the tuned spheres. . . . /
For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t” (5.2.78, 82–3, 85–6).41 She then con-
founds the distinction between natural fecundity and creative imagination:
But if there be nor ever were one such,
It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’imagine
An Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite. (5.2.95–9)

41 On Cleopatra’s resemblance to Isis, also see Adelman (1992) 184–5.

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272 What Was Tragedy?

Although nature should be unable to compete with fancy in the production of

novel and wonderful forms, the Antony that nature imagined would and did sur-
pass any mere production of fancy. But was this Antony imagined by nature or by
Cleopatra? As she assumes the identity of Isis and as history is colored by myth the
distinction ceases to matter.
Declaring that she is “again for Cydnus” (5.2.227), Cleopatra orders her women
to fetch her best attire: “And when thou has done this chare, I'll give thee leave /
To play till doomsday” (5.2.230–1). Labor and theatrical performance, play and
earnest, life and death are once again confounded as Cleopatra prepares for her
final metamorphosis: “Now from head to foot / I am marble-constant. Now the
fleeting moon / No planet is of mine” (5.2.238–40); “I am fire and air; my other
elements / I give to baser life” (5.2.288–9). A country clown who speaks absurd-
ities while delivering his asps may seem to be employed merely to set off the high
seriousness of the queen’s immortal longings, but Charmion continues to confuse
high and low, earnest and jest, as she refers to her mistress as a “lass unparalleled”
and then observes, “Your crown’s awry; / I’ll mend it, and then play” (5.2.315,
317–18).
The romantic tradition of Shakespeare criticism running from Coleridge to
Bradley is filled with admiration for the “sovereign ease” with which Shakespeare
pictures an entire world on a “vast canvas, crowded with figures, glowing with
colour and a superb animation,” an ease that is nowhere more evident than in the
“exultant mastery” with which he portrays Cleopatra, a character who “stands in
a group with Falstaff and Hamlet.” But the play has never been central to the
­romantic conception of Shakespearean tragedy because the persons in the first
three acts “do not kill, do not even tremble and weep,” because Antony’s passion is
“represented as a force which he could hardly even desire to resist,” and because its
close produces an effect of “triumph and pleasure” that overbalances the “fear and
grief and pity” with which an audience should contemplate “tragic error and the
advance of doom.” Dryden evidently agreed with Bradley’s diagnosis of the play’s
faulty construction and shared his distress that “the scenes we remember first” in
the opening acts are “the least indispensable to the plot.”42 But because he remains
innocent of the idealist insistence that tragedy should display “morality’s inde-
pendence, its freedom, in the throes of passion, from nature’s laws,” he does not
share Bradley’s concerns about the nature of Antony’s passion.43 Nor does he
harbor the suspicion that a triumph, even in death, may interfere with the tragic
resonance of its close.

D RY D E N ’ S A RT I F I C I A L O R D E R

When Dryden published An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667), he feared that there
were no bays to be expected in the walks of the Elizabethans because there was

42 Bradley (1941) 280–1, 299, 284, 287, 304, 292, 284.

43 On the Pathetic (1793) in Schiller (1995) 45.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 273

“scarce a Humour, a Character, or any kind of Plot” that they had not already
exhausted.44 But by the time he had finished writing Aureng-Zebe (1675), he
confessed that a “secret shame” invaded “his breast at Shakespear’s sacred name”
and that he was awed to hear his “Godlike Romans rage.”45 This crisis of conscience
ushered in a new period of restless theorization and experimentation with tragic
forms that produced All for Love (1677), Heads of an Answer to Rymer (1677),
Oedipus (1678), Troilus and Cressida (1679), and Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy
(1679). During these years, Dryden returned to Shakespearean blank verse as
the most natural vehicle for the pathetic speeches essential to tragedy. He read
Aristotelean theories of tragedy with serious interest but an independent mind.
And he faced up to the achievement of Sophocles, Euripides, and his great French
contemporary, Racine.
Racine’s Bérénice, which Thomas Betterton and the Duke’s Company had just
presented in Thomas Otway’s translation and adaptation in 1677, showed Dryden
how to revise Antony and Cleopatra into a tragedy that would respect the artificial
day by focusing exclusively on the prospect of two lovers separating. Dryden inten-
sifies and purifies the elegiac quality of Shakespeare’s tragedy while removing its
residue of historical particularity and purging away its undercurrent of satire.46 He
probably considered this purification crucial to his effort to use the stage as a means
of reforming the disposition of Charles II’s subjects at a moment of political crisis,
but it in no way abbreviated the play’s theatrical life. All for Love reached the peak
of its popularity in the first half of the eighteenth century and continued to be the
principal play on the subject until Charles Kemble staged a hybrid version of All
for Love and Antony and Cleopatra in 1813. Antony and Cleopatra only began to
emerge from theatrical obscurity with a production at Covent Garden in 1833,
and even so, audiences would have to wait until 1849 for a production without
interpolations. Thus, for about a century and a half, it was Dryden’s All for Love,
and not Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra—deemed “that hopelessly impossible
thing for the picture stage”—that was the definitive treatment of this great tragic
subject.47
Although Dryden had long chafed at the restrictions imposed by the three unities,
he boasts that he has observed them “more exactly” than “perhaps, the English Theater
requires,” and that his “Action” is “so much one” that it is the only tragedy of Antony
and Cleopatra that is “without Episode, or Underplot; every Scene in the Tragedy
conducing to the main design, and every Act concluding with a turn of it.”48 The
entire tragedy transpires on a day given over to “Pomp and Triumphs” to celebrate

44 Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) in Dryden (1956–89) 17: 73.

45 Prologue to Aureng-Zebe (1675), ll. 14–15, in Dryden (1956–89) 12: 159.
46 On the relationship of Otway’s translation and adaptation to Racine’s original tragedy,
see Wheatley (1956) ch. 2. Zebouni (1965) 81–94 claims that Bérénice represents “a world altogether
different” from the plays of Dryden and Corneille. McHenry, Jr. (1991) argues for a closer rela-
tionship between Bérénice and All for Love, one centered on their treatment of the fear of
betrayal.
47 Odell (1966 [1920]) 176. For the play’s performance history (and this quotation), see Novak’s
commentary in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 363–6.
48 Preface to All for Love (1677) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 10.
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274 What Was Tragedy?

the day “That gave the World a Lord” in Antony (1.1.139–40). Serapion orders
that the general voice be, “Live Antony; and Cleopatra live!” (1.1.141), but the
command pits desire against doom, for the tombs of the “mighty dead” have already
burst open and a “lamentable voice / Cried, Ægypt is no more!” (1.1.23, 27–8). By
having Serapion instruct the people to set out “The Images of all your sleeping
Fathers, / With Laurels crown’d” and direct the priests to “Do present Sacrifice”
(1.1.145–6, 148), Dryden creates a perfect coincidence between the historical time
of the action and the experience of watching the action in the theater, for the play
itself both rehearses a sacrifice and commemorates the mighty dead, crowned with
laurel and set out for all to see.
The setting for the tragedy is as charged with meaning as the day. Antony is now
“Shrunk from the vast extent of all his honors, / And crampt within a corner of the
World” (1.1.178–9). Nor is it just any corner. It is the Temple of Isis, the goddess
whose habiliments Cleopatra assumed in the marketplace, suggesting her own
power to receive all forms and become all manner of things, “to wit, light, dark-
nesse, day, night, fire, water, life, death, beginning and end.”49 Just as the fictional
time of the tragedy coincides with its theatrical occasion, so its setting is one with
the theatrical space, which becomes a Temple of Isis for the duration of the per-
formance. Dryden’s revisions eliminate the impression that we are watching a
“great occurrence,” a historical contest waged on a global scale. As a crisis tragedy
that respects the artificial day, All for Love offers us a different theatrical experience:
an intense distillation of experience perceived from a single point at a single point
in time. It resolves tragedy into painting.

P O RT R A I T U R E A N D H I S TO RY PA I N T I N G

In his Parallel, of Poetry and Painting (1695), Dryden compares and contrasts the
art of depicting the human form in the visual arts with that of depicting persons
in a tragedy. He begins by quoting extensively from Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s
introduction to his 1672 Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Le vite
de’ pittori, scvltori et architetti moderni), an influential statement of the seminal
role that “ideas” should play in the creation of art, a claim that had been advanced
earlier by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo in his 1584 Treatise on the Art of Painting
(Trattato dell’arte de la pittvra) and Frederico Zuccari in his 1607 The Idea of
Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (L’idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti). In a pas-
sage reminiscent of Sidney, Bellori reproves “those Artists who propose to themselves
onely the imitation and likeness of such or such a particular person.” “Demetrius,”
he proceeds,
was tax’d for being too Natural; Dionysius was also blam’d for drawing Men like us, and
was commonly call’d $Amhqxpæcqafio, that is, a Painter of Men. In our times Michael
Angelo da Carravaggio, was esteem’d too Natural. He drew persons as they were; and
Bambaccio, and most of the Dutch Painters, have drawn the worst likeness. Lysippus of

49 Plutarch (1603) 1318.

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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 275

old, upbraided the common sort of Sculptours, for making Men such as they were found in
Nature; and boasted of himself that he made them as they ought to be: which is a Precept
of Aristotle, given as well to Poets as to Painters.50
It can be easy to assume that an extreme fidelity to life is desirable in the mimetic
arts, and it is no accident that the exultation of Shakespearean naturalism and
­organicism in the early nineteenth century went hand-in-hand, especially in the
criticism of Hegel, with a lively appreciation of the vitality (Lebenigkeit) of Dutch
painting.51 But when we bear in mind that the creative practice that Bellori recom-
mends is exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Guido Reni, it becomes
easier to see why seventeenth-century critics often stressed the importance of
­embodying the refined idea of persons on stage.
With his typical independence of mind and his deep appreciation of Shakespeare’s
ability to draw characters—even those, like Caliban, who “were not in Nature”—
Dryden demurs: “Now as this Idea of Perfection is of little use in Portraits (or the
resemblances of particular persons) so neither is it in the Characters of Comedy,
and Tragedy . . . . The perfection of such Stage-characters consists chiefly in their
likeness to the deficient faulty Nature, which is their Original.”52 Yet the impera-
tive to produce a likeness must be weighed against the necessity of presenting
persons of middling virtue who will arouse our pity for their misfortune. Thus the
poet must behave like the painter, who “will not take that side of the Face which
has some notorious blemish in it; but either draw it in profile . . . or else shadow the
more imperfect side.” Turning to his own practice elsewhere in the treatise, he
maintains, “my Characters of Antony and Cleopatra, though they are favourable to
them, have nothing of outrageous Panegyrick: their Passions were their own, and
such as were given them by History: onely the deformities of them were cast into
Shadows, that they might be the Objects of Compassion: whereas if I had chosen
a Noon-day Light for them, somewhat must have been discover’d, which would
rather have mov’d our Hatred than our Pity.”53
Dryden believes that painting and tragedy are affiliated arts because they are both
“narrowly circumscrib’d by the Mechanick Rules of Time and Place.” Therefore sub-
jects that are but “particular Pieces in Livy’s History”—such as “Curtius throwing
himself into a Gulph, and the two Decii sacrificing themselves for the safety of
their Country”—are “full compleat Subjects for the Pen and Pencil,” “Tragedy and
Picture.”54 In both arts, “the principle Figure . . . must appear in the midst of the Picture,
under the principal Light, to distinguish it from the rest which are onely its attendants.”55
The preservation of hierarchy is crucial to the aim of arousing terror and compassion
because these “work but weakly, when they are divided into many persons.”56 In fact,

50 Parallel, of Poetry and Painting (1695) in Dryden (1956–89) 20: 41–2.

51 Rutter (2010) 78–100.
52 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) and Parallel, of Painting and Poetry (1695) in Dryden
(1956–89) 13: 239, 20: 47–8.
53 Parallel, of Painting and Poetry (1695) in Dryden (1956–89) 20: 48, 70.
54 Parallel, of Painting and Poetry (1695) in Dryden (1956–89) 20: 53.
55 Parallel, of Painting and Poetry (1695) in Dryden (1956–89) 20: 66.
56 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 237.
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276 What Was Tragedy?

Dryden frets that he was mistaken to bring Octavia and her children to Alexandria
because “the dividing of pity, like the cutting of a River into many Channels, abated
the strength of the natural stream.”57 Whereas Shakespeare is profligate with his
dramatis personae, introducing thirty-four in Antony and Cleopatra and giving some
of his most memorable poetry to minor historical actors such as Enobarbus, Dryden
conceives of his cast of characters as figures in a unified and distilled design.
Endorsing Charles Alphonse Dufresnoy’s criticism of “Figures to be lett: because the
Picture has no use of them,” Dryden observes that some modern plays have twenty
actors “when the Action has not requir’d half the number.”58 It may be no accident
that All for Love calls for precisely ten.
Dryden’s rigorous ideal of design, his respect for the mechanic rules of time and
place, and his sense of decorum all militate against his falling in with a method of
characterization that, like Plutarch’s and Shakespeare’s, depends on the principle
that we reveal our true selves through light occasions, casual quips, and sports.
Dryden insists, in contrast, that every person and every incident in a tragedy must
be necessary to the main design: the poet must “reject all incidents which are ­foreign
to his Poem, and are naturally no parts of it: they are Wenns, and other Excrescences,
which belong not to the Body, but deform it: no person, no incident in the Piece,
or in the Play, but must be of use to carry on the main Design.”59 As a result, we
cannot imagine him finding an occasion to present Cleopatra wiling away the time
listening to music, bantering with her women, and deciding whether to play billiards
or to fish in Antony’s absence. In Antony and Cleopatra, Charmion recalls an inci-
dent (recorded in Plutarch) when her mistress, having detected that Antony was
having a diver place fish on his hook to win a wager, substituted a salt fish. “That
time? O times!” replies Cleopatra,
I laughed him out of patience, and that night
I laughed him into patience, and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him into bed,
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan. (2.5.18–23)
In Dryden, we find no anecdotes of fishing, drunkenness, or cross-dressing. Antony
recalls his idyll in Egypt in the most general terms:
Ant. How I lov’d
Witness ye Dayes and nights, and all your hours,
That Danc’d away with Down upon your Feet,
As all your bus’ness were to count my passion.
One day past by, and nothing saw but Love;
Another came, and still ’twas only Love:
The Suns were weary’d out with looking on,
And I untyr’d with loving. (2.1.281–8)

57 Preface to All for Love (1677) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 11.

58 Parallel, of Painting and Poetry (1695) in Dryden (1956–89) 20: 63.
59 Parallel, of Painting and Poetry (1695) in Dryden (1956–89) 20: 63.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 277

Dryden’s departures from Shakespeare’s methods of characterization can be

­explained not just by his over-arching respect for the principle of design but by his
deference to the four rules of ēthos that critics found in their synthetic reading of
Aristotle and Horace. The manners of stage persons should be apparent; suitable to
their age, sex, and dignity; in keeping with the report of history; and “constant,
and equal, that is, maintain’d the same through the whole design.”60 All of these
rules are consistent with conceiving of tragedy and painting as sister arts (as Aris-
totle and Horace themselves do, at least in early modern interpretations of them),
but the first and the last are particularly illuminated by the relationship. Because
he subscribes to an ideal of apparency, Dryden is not content, like Plutarch and
Shakespeare, with the mixed reports of history. Shakespeare’s characterization
works through time—both the lived time of the fictional persons, as they are
shaped by their experiences, and the elapsed time of the performance, as the audi-
ence enters into those experiences and hears conflicting assessments of the persons,
which the play never resolves into Theophrastan characters. Although Dryden con-
ceives of character as a “composition of qualities,” he maintains that “one virtue,
vice, and passion, ought to be shown in every man, as predominant over all the
rest,” and he wants to make sure that the temperament is clearly impressed on
the audience.61 In All for Love, therefore, he has Ventidius deliver a “character”
before Antony ever enters. When the stern but loyal Roman hears that Antony has
withdrawn into a deep melancholy after the Battle of Actium and is neither eating,
drinking, nor sleeping, he responds:
Ven. Just, just his nature.
Virtues his path; but sometimes ’tis too narrow
For his vast Soul; then he starts out wide,
And bounds into a Vice that bears him far
From his first course, and plunges him in ills;
But, when his danger makes him find his fault,
Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse,
He censures eagerly his own misdeeds,
Judging himself with malice to himself,
And not forgiving what as Man he did,
Because his other parts are more than Man. (1.1.123–33)
Ventidius never wavers from this judgment, even though he is sorely tested by
Antony’s backsliding. If we think of tragedy as a dramatic form that aspires to the
condition of painting, that seeks to contemplate a historical episode from a single
point in time, then the almost universal satisfaction that dramatists and critics
alike express at the requirement that the manners of a drama’s persons should be
“constant, and equal” makes perfect sense. Indeed, they even praise Shakespeare
for respecting it. It is only with the rise of the novel, the development of romantic
character criticism, and the German cult of Bildung, with is emphasis on educa-
tion, cultivation, and self-direction, that audiences begin to look for character

60 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 235–6.

61 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 236.
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278 What Was Tragedy?

development. It is anachronistic to suppose that Shakespeare was pursuing any such

ideal, but both the temporal scope of Antony and Cleopatra and its capacity to
­assimilate Plutarch’s colorful anecdotes means that we have an intense sense of
his persons as beings who endure through time, not figures arranged in a painting.
The importance of following Shakespeare’s characters through time was felt as early
as 1754, when Joseph Warton remarked that “general criticism . . . is more than
commonly absurd with respect to SHAKESPEARE, who must be accompanied
step by step and scene by scene in his gradual developments of characters and
passions.”62 Since then, persistence through time has become almost synonymous
with the experience of subjectivity.

T I D E S T H AT S W E L L A N D R E T I R E TO S E A S

Whenever he discusses the art of characterization, Dryden keeps one eye on the
affective response of the audience. His longstanding concern with the passions of
the audience could only have been confirmed by his reading of René Rapin’s Reflec-
tions on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie, which Thomas Rymer translated from the French
and introduced in 1674 and which Dryden uses as his chief authority in his Grounds
of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), a critical treatise that he appears to have written while
awaiting the first production of All for Love. Interpreting Aristotle through the lens
of Descartes, the French Jesuit attributes “all the Pleasure that one is capable to
receive from Tragedy” to the perturbations of the soul felt by the audience, observing
that “nothing is more sweet to the Soul than agitation,” and that “of all Passions Fear
and Pity are those that make the strongest Impressions on the Heart of Man.”63 A
decade earlier, Dryden had conceived of the passions of the audience as “floods
rais’d in little Brooks by a sudden rain,” but by the time he came to write All for
Love, he had become convinced that they could be treated more properly as “tides”
that “are swelled and then retire to seas.”64 Like Racine, Dryden depicts one sea
change per act, which can be charted against a Cartesian grid that reveals if Antony
and Cleopatra are together or apart, erect or collapsed.
When Antony first enters the stage, he is, according to the stage directions,
“walking with a disturb’d Motion.” “How sorrow shakes him!” exclaims Ventidius
as he watches Antony fall to the ground, “So, now the Tempest tears him up by th’
Roots, / And on the ground extends the noble ruin” (1.1.213–15). Throughout
Act 1, Ventidius seeks to recall Antony to his former self and to revive his spirits
with the promise of ten legions from the East who await the arrival of their general
to take command. Although Antony cannot be roused easily from his sullen mel-
ancholy, his old bond of friendship with his general—reawakened by tears and
embraces—is the instrument of a complete moral recovery. “Methinks you breath /

62 Joseph Warton, The Adventurer, No. 116, December 15, 1753 in Vickers, ed. (1974–81) 4: 78.
63 Rapin (1694 [1674]) 112, 9, 112.
64 Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) and Epilogue of Aureng-Zebe (1675), l. 8, both in Dryden
(1956–89) 17: 48 and 12: 249.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 279

Another Soul,” says Ventidius. “Your looks are more Divine; / You speak a Heroe,
and you move a God” (1.1.435–7). The speech with which Antony closes the act
completes his conversion from lying like the abject shadow of an emperor to
striding off stage like the personification of Death:
Come on, My Soldier!
Our hearts and arms are still the same: I long
Once more to meet our foes; that Thou and I,
Like Time and Death, marching before our Troops,
May taste fate to ’em; mow ’em out a passage,
And entring where the foremost Squadrons yield,
Begin the noble Harvest of the Field. (1.1.447–53)
Act 2 opens with Cleopatra responding to the re-cemented alliance between
Antony and Ventidius: “What shall I do, or whither shall I turn? / Ventidius has
o’rcome, and he will go” (2.1.1–2). The transformation that Antony has undergone
between his first prostrate appearance on the stage and his exit at the end of Act 1
is confirmed by Charmion’s account: “I found him then / Incompass’d round,
I think, with Iron Statues; / So mute, so motionless his Soldiers stood” (2.1.47–9).
The question posed by Act 2 is whether Antony can still pity Cleopatra as he pitied
Ventidius in Act 1. It is precisely at this affective register that Antony is at his
weakest, as Ventidius knows: “Now lay a Sigh i’th’ way, to stop his passage: / Prepare
a Tear, and bid it for his Legions” (2.1.324–5). But it is Cleopatra’s written proof
that she has refused a kingdom from Octavius in order to die with Antony that
melts her lover. Now he embraces Cleopatra in the presence of Ventidius, and
when his general asks him squarely if he will go, he answers as stoutly, “Go! Wither?
go from all that’s excellent!” (2.1.440). Act 2 brings about a perfect reversal of Act
1, but rather than unmanning him, Antony’s erotic desire for Cleopatra stokes his
martial valor, encouraging him to fight a swift decisive battle so that he might tri-
umph with her in bed:
I’m eager to return before I go;
For, all the pleasures I have known, beat thick
On my remembrance: how I long for night!
That both the sweets of mutual love may try,
And once Triumph o’re Cæsar ere we dye. (2.1.458–62)
Whereas in Act 1 Ventidius had scolded Alexas, “Let your Ægyptian Timbrels
play alone; / Nor mix Effeminate Sounds with Roman Trumpets” (1.1.194–5), Act 3
affirms the tenuous rapprochement between Antony and Cleopatra, Rome and
Alexandria, honor and love. The Egyptian women and eunuchs enter from one
stage door, dancing amid the sound of timbrels, while Antony and the Roman sol-
diers, heralded by trumpets, march in triumph through the other. After a dance of
the Egyptians, Cleopatra crowns Antony with a laurel wreath, and they address
each other as “my brighter Venus” and “my greater Mars.” It is now Ventidius who
finds it difficult to gain an audience with Antony, but he finally manages to sep-
arate Antony from Cleopatra by introducing Dollabella, Antony’s wife Octavia,
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280 What Was Tragedy?

and their two daughters. When Antony takes Octavia’s hand, he affirms that she is
now in the position occupied by Cleopatra at the beginning of the act: “This is thy
Triumph; lead me where thou wilt; / Ev’n to thy Brothers Camp” (3.1.370–1). By
the end of the act, Cleopatra is in a state of collapse. Whereas the dance of the
Egyptians and the Romans at the beginning had been a symbol of life, triumph,
and unity, now her drooping spirits produce an hallucinatory dance of death: “My
sight grows dim, and every object dances, / And swims before me, in the maze of
death” (3.1.469–70).
In Act 4, all the major characters are untrue to their better selves. Antony cannot
trust himself to tell Cleopatra in person that they must part, so, just as Titus depu-
tizes Antiochus to break with the queen in Bérénice, Antony asks Dollabella to
carry her the news. Acting in the underhanded manner that Bérénice suspects
­Antiochus of adopting, Dollabella misrepresents his best friend’s sentiments in the
hope of winning Cleopatra’s love, she feigns a kindness toward Dollabella in the
hope of arousing Antony’s jealousy, and Ventidius starts acting like the one man in
Egypt he despises the most, the scheming eunuch Alexas, who is always trying to
stage-manage the passions of others in order to serve his mistress. Whereas the act
had commenced with Antony convinced that Dollabella and Cleopatra were his
truest allies, it ends with him accusing them of treason:
I can forgive
A Foe, but not a Mistress and a Friend.
Treason is there in its most horrid shape,
Where trust is greatest: and the Soul resign’d
Is stabb’d by its own Guards. (4.1.543–7)

Antony then dismisses Dollabella and Cleopatra from the stage in a scene that
closely resembles the end of Bérénice. All three weep, and Antony concludes that
they must “Live, but live wretched,” all taking their “several ways,” with “all the
Earth / And all the Seas betwixt” their “sunder’d Loves” and no view “common but
the Sun and Skys” (4.1.590, 595, 592–4).
Act 5 commences with Cleopatra’s efforts to “die inward, / And choak this Love”
(5.1.12–13), efforts that rehearse those of Antony at the beginning of Act 1.
Antony, in contrast, is ready for a fight: He wants “T’ o’er-leap this Gulph of Fate,
/ And leave our wond’ring Destinies behind” by piercing through to his old veterans
(5.1.187–8). But the news of Cleopatra’s suicide makes Antony too resign himself:
“I will not fight; there’s no more work for War. / The bus’ness of my angry hours is
done” (5.1.261–2). When Cleopatra rushes on stage in the apprehension that the
false report of her death might drive Antony himself to suicide, she finds she is
too late. She and her attendants raise him to a chair, and Antony comforts her
with the thought,
Think we have had a clear and glorious day;
And Heav’n did kindly to delay the storm
Just till our close of ev’ning. Ten years love,
And not a moment lost, but all improv’d
To th’utmost joys: What Ages have we liv’d! (5.1.389–93)
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 281

When Antony has died, Cleopatra crowns him with a laurel wreath to celebrate his
triumph over himself, and she dresses herself in the habiliments of the goddess that
she wore when she first met him on the banks of the Cydnus River:
Now seat me by my Lord. I claim this place;
For I must conquer Caesar too, like him,
And win my share o’th’ World. Hail, you dear Relicks
Of my Immortal Love! (5.1.464–7)
As she is dying from the venom of the asp, she turns and lays herself upon Antony’s
breast, thus affirming Alexas’s claim at the beginning of the play,
O, she dotes,
She dotes, Serapion, on this vanquish’d Man,
And winds her self about his mighty ruins. (1.1.76–8)65
In contrast to Act 4, which had ended with the prospect of Antony, Cleopatra, and
Dollabella wandering like exiles prey to the elements, Act 5 ends with Antony and
Cleopatra seated “in State together, / As if they were giving Laws to half Mankind,”
“Secure from humane chance” and sheltered from the “Storms of Fate” that will
now fly over their tomb (5.1.508–9, 516–17).66 Whereas Shakespeare uses both
the lower and the upper stages of the Globe to recreate a drama of elevation and
transfiguration, Dryden, writing for the picture-stage of Drury Lane Theatre, sets
the enthroned relicts of Antony and Cleopatra at the “point of sight in which all
the lines terminate.”67 Octavius, who has never made an appearance on stage but
who has been an oppressive presence in the wings throughout the play, is “just
entring” (5.1.513).
If each act of All for Love concludes with a turn of the main design, its essen-
tial idea is concentrated in one or more tableaux that may consist either of a
stage picture or of a poetic vision that is so vivid as to bring the object before
our eyes as if it were present. More often than not, Dryden tries to combine
the effect. The central idea of Act 1 is Antony’s abject depression, and Dryden
impresses this on the imagination of his audience with what may be the most
striking stage picture of the tragedy, Antony lying face down like the shadow of
his former self:
Lye there, thou shadow of an Emperour;
The place thou pressest on thy Mother Earth
Is all thy Empire now: now it contains thee;
Some few dayes hence, and then twill be too large,
When thou’rt contracted in thy narrow Urn. (1.1.216–20)
In Act 3, Dryden presents the choice that Antony must make between Cleopatra
and Octavia in a triptych. The first image is the recollection of Cleopatra’s appearance

65 On this imagery, see Aubrey Williams (1984).

66 On the relative importance of images of change and transcendence, see the debate in Hughes
(1970); Canfield (1975); and Hughes (1983).
67 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 230.
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282 What Was Tragedy?

in a galley rowed down the silver Cydnus, Dryden’s version of the description from
North’s Plutarch that commences, in Antony and Cleopatra, “The barge she sat in,
like a burnished throne, / Burned on the water” (2.2.201–2). The second is the
stage picture of Antony ambushed by his friends and family, who urge all their
­affective ties on him at once:
Octav. You, Agrippina, hang upon his arms;
And you, Antonia, clasp about his waste:
If he will shake you off, if he will dash you
Against the Pavement, you must bear it, Children;
For you are mine, and I was born to suffer.
[Here the Children go to him, &c.
Ven. Was ever sight so moving! Emperor!
Dolla. Friend!
Octav. Husband!
Both Childr. Father!
Ant. I am vanquish’d: take me. (3.1.356–62)
And the third tableau of Act 3 is the confrontation of Octavia and Cleopatra, a
scene whose “Satyre” between “exasperated Rivals” differentiates Dryden’s drama-
turgy, on his own account, from Racine’s decorous theater.68 The great tableau of
Act 5 is, of course, the spectacle of the lovers seated in a stony stillness whose final
security from human chance is only emphasized by the tardy collapse of the dying
Charmion.
Dryden’s habit of translating dramatic situations into history paintings for the
stage has been criticized by unsympathetic critics such as F. R. Leavis, who works
uncritically with the ideal of the “living principle” and “organic form” that he
­inherits from the romantics, as evidence that Dryden’s tragic persons “exist only
in a world of stage postures.”69 But in the mimetic arts, there is always a balance
between naturalistic reporting and the disclosure of universal ideas and passions,
and discovery of the latter, even when it entails a violence to life, can be as satis-
fying and liberating—in short, as aesthetically rewarding—as the former. A great
deal of the tragic dramaturgy of the early modern period, whether declaimed or
sung, depends on a dialogue of change and stasis in which dramatic situations or
passions are brought to a point of plenitude and then given definitive expression
in a tirade, an aria, or a stage tableau in which time is arrested. Dryden is a master
of this art.

68 “The French Poets . . . would not . . . have suffer’d Cleopatra and Octavia to have met; or if they had
met, there must only have pass’d betwixt them some cold civilities, but no eagerness of repartée, for
fear of offending against the greatness of their Characters, and the modesty of their Sex. This Objec-
tion I foresaw, and at the same time contemn’d: for I judg’d it both natural and probable, that Octavia,
proud of her new-gain’d Conquest, would search out Cleopatra to triumph over her, and that Cleo-
patra, thus attacqu’d, was not a spirit to shun an encounter: and ’tis not unlikely, that two exasperated
Rivals should use such Satyre as I have put in their mouths; for after all, though the one were a Roman,
and the other a Queen, they were both Women” (Preface to All for Love [1677] in Dryden (1956–89]
13: 11).
69 Leavis (1975) 151.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 283

LANGUAGE

To the ears of many Restoration poets, Shakespeare’s tragic verse was neither as clear
nor as magnificent as it should be. When Sir William Davenant staged Macbeth,
for example, he thought it necessary to eliminate some of the metaphors. “The
flighty purpose never is o’ertook / Unless the deed go with it” (4.1.145) became
“Our Purposes seldom succeed, unless our Deeds / Go with them”; and “My dull
brain was wrought with things forgotten” (3.1.149) became “I was reflecting upon
past transactions.”70 Davenant was no eccentric. Dryden also found “many” of
Shakespeare’s “words, and more of his Phrases” to be “scarce intelligible,” and those
which he could understand were often “ungrammatical” or “coarse.” Shakespeare’s
“whole stile” was, in his estimation, “pester’d with Figurative expressions.” Although
Dryden believed that no playwright excelled Shakespeare in his understanding of
the manners and passions, he could not say the same for “his manner of expres-
sion” because he “often obscures his meaning by his words, and sometimes makes
it unintelligible.” The “fury” of Shakespeare’s “fancy often transported him, beyond
the bounds of Judgment, either in coyning of new words and phrases, or racking
words which were in use, into the violence of a Catechresis.” To “say nothing
without a Metaphor, a Simile, an Image, or description, is,” said Dryden, “to smell
a little too strongly of the Buskin.”71
The sort of poetry that Dryden has in mind is exemplified by Antony’s expres-
sion of despair and disgust in Antony and Cleopatra after the Egyptian fleet has
deserted to Octavius:
The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar, and this pine is barked,
That overtopped them all. (4.12.20–4)
The hearts, here used as a synecdoche for his loyal followers, that once trailed after
him like base spaniels are now melting, but they are also dissolving the sweetmeats
that he gave them, slavering them over Caesar. Is that a good thing for a blos-
soming tree? Never mind. Antony, who a moment before was striding with dogs at
heel, is now a stationary pine, taller and perhaps straighter than Caesar but doomed
to die because his bark has been stripped, depriving him of nourishment. One can
see why Coleridge compared Shakespeare’s language to a snake turning on its own
strength, but as late as the mid-eighteenth century the intelligent critic John Upton
complained that “the crouding and mixing together heterogeneous metaphors is
doing a sort of violence to the mind; for each new metaphor calls it too soon off
from the idea which the former has raised: ’tis a fault, doubtless . . . and instances
are very numerous in Shakespeare.”72

70 See Shakespeare (1985) and Spencer (1965) 87, 45.

71 Preface to Troilus and Cressida (1679) and Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679) in Dryden
(1956–89) 13: 225, 244.
72 John Upton, Critical Observations on Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (1748) in Vickers, ed. (1974–81) 3: 322.
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284 What Was Tragedy?

The fact that the Dryden of All for Love on occasion writes a speech that is more
dense in figurative expressions than the parallel passage in Antony and Cleopatra
has led Maximillian Novak to speculate that All for Love is an isolated experiment
in which Dryden charges his dramatic verse with an unusual number of meta-
phors.73 But the dominant idiom of the play is the direct expression of feeling
­expressed in a blank verse that obeys natural word order and achieves its effects
through musicality:
O those two words! Their sound shou’d be divided:
Hadst though been false, and dy’d; or hadst thou liv’d,
And hadst been true—But Innocence and Death!
This shows not well above. (5.1.238–41)
This is what T. S. Eliot admired about the blank verse of All for Love, which he
called “a miracle of revivification” that, in escaping the “bad influence of the last
followers of Shakespeare, with their dissolution of rhythm nearly into prose, and
their worn-out wardrobe of imagery,” had set “the norm of blank verse for later
blank verse playwrights.”74
When Dryden does introduce a metaphor, he does not let his language twist
and untwist on its own strength. Instead he projects a clear visual image that can
impress itself on the minds of his audience. Here is Dollabella encountering his
bosom friend Antony after a long separation:
I must be silent; for my Soul is busie
About a nobler work: she’s new come home,
Like a long-absent man, and wanders o’er
Each room, a stranger to her own, to look
If all be safe. (3.1.123–7)
And here is Antony regretting his inability to conceal his sorrow at the apparent
infidelity of Cleopatra, an inability that makes Octavia resolve to leave him
(4.1.400–2):
Why was I fram’d with this plain honest heart,
Which knows not to disguise its griefs and weakness,
But bears its workings outward to the World?
I should have kept the mighty anguish in,
And forc’d a smile at Cleopatra’s falshood:
Octavia had believ’d it, and had staid:
But I am made a shallow-forded Stream,
Seen to the bottom: all my clearness scorn’d,
And all my faults expos’d! (4.1.432–40)
In both instances, the metaphor is dilated so that it can make a clear impression.
Its image also corresponds with what the audience sees on stage. Dollabella’s
eyes are exploring the countenance of Antony even as he compares his soul to a

73 Novak, commentary in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 369.

74 Eliot (1932) 34.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 285

long-absent man returning home, and Octavia has just swept past Antony when he
compares himself to a shallow-forded stream.
Just as Dryden concentrates on one metaphor at a time in most of his dramatic
speeches, he uses a narrow range of key words and images in his tragedy in order
not to muddle their effect, a technique that, I would suggest, he learns from
­Racine. Some of these key words, such as “kindness” are ethical and thematic, but
others, such as “ruin,” conjure up the image of a fall or a decayed monument.
­Antony and Cleopatra’s erotic love is described in terms of spring buds and autumn
fruits, trinkets, jewels, and treasure. Storms, floods, and shipwrecks suggest their
subjection to their own passions and their vulnerability to the affairs of man. Meta-
phors that appear to be unidimensional when read in isolation may take on
additional significance when read in sequence. Let’s consider the opening speech
of Serapion, the priest of Isis:
Portents, and Prodigies, are grown so frequent,
That they have lost their Name. Our fruitful Nile
Flow’d ere the wonted Season, with a Torrent
So unexpected, and so wondrous fierce,
That the wild Deluge overtook the haste
Ev’n of the Hinds that watch’d it: Men and Beasts
Were born above the tops of Trees, that grew
On th’utmost Margin of the Water-mark.
Then, with so swift an Ebb, the Floud drove backward,
It slipt from underneath the Scaly Herd:
Here monstrous Phocæ panted on the Shore;
Forsaken Dolphins there, with their broad tails,
Lay lashing the departing Waves: Hard by ’em,
Sea-Horses floundring in the slimy mud,
Toss’d up their heads, and dash’d the ooze about ’em. (1.1.1–15)
Serapion’s description of the flood is meant to remind us of what has gone before
the play begins, for Antony and Cleopatra’s love has over-swollen the banks and
then receded amid the mutual recriminations occasioned by their loss at the Battle
of Actium. We are put on notice that we are watching their last breaths, and perhaps
we are promised an analogous flood of passion in the cause of tragic purgation. But
it is not until Act 3 that we are confirmed in our suspicion that Serapion’s speech
may also serve as an image of the tide in the affairs of men. “Thou has what’s left
of me,” Antony tells Dolabella,
For I am now so sunk from what I was,
Thou find’st me at my lowest water-mark.
The Rivers that ran in and rais’d my fortunes,
Are all dry’d up, or take another course:
What I have left is from my native Spring;
I’ve still a heart that swells, in scorn of fate,
And lifts me to my banks. (3.1.127–34)
We are meant to recall both passages when Octavia despises Antony as a shallow-
forded stream in Act 4, for her attitude suggests that, like her brother, Octavia is
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286 What Was Tragedy?

more attuned to the rivers of fortune than to the native springs of the heart. That
is a grave shortcoming, in Dryden’s view, for All for Love is dedicated to the ideal
of a society cemented by affective bonds.

T H E WO R L D W E L L L O S T

All for Love’s apparent endorsement of the conduct of Antony and Cleopatra has
long been considered morally suspect by readers. Annoyed that the Theatre Royal
had put off producing his revision of Coriolanus in favor of reviving All for Love,
John Dennis penned an indictment of the play that has been echoed by many a
subsequent critic: Dryden’s artistic design served the court’s secret plan of estab-
lishing arbitrary government, for by encouraging English subjects to become slaves
to their own passions, All for Love prepared them to be slaves in the polity:
For was ever any thing so pernicious, so immoral, so criminal, as the Design of that
Play? I have mention’d the Title of it, give me leave to set before you the two last Lines:
And Fame to late Posterity shall tell,
No Lovers liv’d so great, or dy’d so well.
And this Encomium of the Conduct and the Death of Anthony and Cleopatra, a
Conduct so immoral, and a Self-murder so criminal, is, to give it more Force, put into
the Mouth of the High-Priest of Isis; tho’ that Priest could not but know, that what he
thus commended, would cause immediately the utter Destruction of his Country, and
make it become a Conquer’d and a Roman Province. Certainly never could the Design
of an Author square more exactly with the Design of White-Hall, at the time when it
was written, which was by debauching the People absolutely to enslave them.75
Dennis was quite right to suspect that Dryden’s endorsement of a “transcendent pas-
sion” that soared “out of Reasons view” (2.1.20–1) was intended to be sympathetic to
the court and hostile to the opposition’s complaints about the growth of popery and
arbitrary government under a king whose “Scepter” and “Prick” were “of a length,”
permitting her “that plays with one” to “sway the other.”76 (The chief object of their
discontent was Louise de Kéroualle, the duchess of Portsmouth, a Catholic and a
French spy who would eventually have a medal struck showing Cupid atop the world
with the motto, Vincit omnia [He conquers all things] [Figs. 6.2a–b]).77 In his Epistle
Dedicatory, Dryden dismisses any possibility that Charles II’s opponents might be seek-
ing a mere reform of government, saying that “every Remonstrance by private Men has
the seed of Treason in it.” “Both my Nature, as I am an Englishman, and my Reason, as
I am a Man, have bred in me a loathing to that specious name of a Republick: that mock
appearance of a Liberty, where all who have not a part in Government, are Slaves: and
Slaves they are of a viler note than such as are Subjects to an absolute Dominion.”78

75 Dennis (1939–43) 2: 163.

76 Epistle Dedicatory to Charles Sedley in Shadwell (1679) sig. A2r-[v]; “Satyr on Charles II”
(1673/4), ll. 11–12, in Wilmot (1968).
77 MacLeod and Alexander (2001) 150.
78 Preface to All for Love (1677) in Dryden (1956–89) 13: 7, 6.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 287

Fig. 6.2a. Obverse of a silver medal struck by George Bower, perhaps to mark Louise de
Kéroualle’s creation as Duchess of Portsmouth in 1673. Gilbert Burnet, however, claims
that the medal commemorates another event when, after intruding on Louise and the
Grand Prior of France, and “seeing more than he had a mind to see,” the King renewed his
ardor for his mistress. If the story is accurate, the medal should be dated 1685. British Mu-
seum, London, Department of Coins and Medals (M 7598 EH).
© The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 6.2b. The reverse of Louise de Kéroualle’s medal pronounces that love conquers all
things. Gilbert Burnet recorded the story of the medal’s circulation (and suppression) “to
show how far the insolence of a whore can rise.” British Museum, London, Department of
Coins and Medals (M 7598 EH).
© The Trustees of the British Museum.
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288 What Was Tragedy?

The remedy that Dryden offers is to clarify and rectify the passions by example.
He takes his understanding of tragic purgation from the Jesuit theorist Rapin,
whom we considered in chapter 5. But on what standard of judgment does he
rely when deciding how his audience ought rightly to feel? The clearest statement
of it may be found in Seneca’s Of Benefits (De Beneficiis), which enjoyed a wide
circulation in the seventeenth century in the translations of Arthur Golding
(1578) and Thomas Lodge (1620) and the abstract of Roger L’Estrange (1679).79
Seneca’s treatise teaches that men should enter into relations of mutual obliga-
tion in a spirit of generosity and gratitude. They can do this by conferring and
accepting benefits.80 A benefit, as L’Estrange’s abstract defines it, is “a good Office,
done with Intention, and Judgment. . . . Or otherwise, It is a Voluntary, and Benevolent
Action, that delights the Giver, in the Comfort it brings to the Receiver.” The benefit
does not consist, however, in the concrete action or gift but in the mind of the
doer: It is an intention that implies an affect. As L’Estrange explains, “The whole
business (almost) of Mankind in Society, falls under this Head: The Duties
of Kings and Subjects; Husbands and Wives; Parents, and Children; Masters,
and Servants; ­Natives, and Strangers; High, and Low; Rich, and Poor; Strong, and
Weak; Friends, and Enemies.” The “Art, and Skill of conferring Benefits” is “the
very Ciment of all Communities, and the Blessing of Particulars.” L’Estrange
decided to publish his abstract because he believed the “Unthankfulness of
these Times” needed some such remedy lest some of the “very Actors” in the
“TRAGEDY” of Charles I’s execution should set a similar project on foot against
the current government.81
Whereas Cicero determines which duties should take precedence by considering
the hierarchy of authorities to whom men owe submission (gods, homeland, par-
ents), Seneca orders them according to the claim on us that individuals can make
on the basis of mutual obligations. Rather than bestow benefits in the sordid expect-
ation of a return, we should ply our trade like merchants who shrug off the loss of
ships at sea. Yet the kindness, pity, friendship, or loyalty that motivates others to
bestow benefits on us does deserve a return. In All for Love, all these words take
on a tremendous significance. Variants of the word “kind” alone appear forty
times, for kindness is the most important standard by which Antony’s relationships
with Ventidius, Dollabella, Octavia, and even Cleopatra are judged.82 “Unkind,
unkind,” exclaims Cleopatra when Dollabella delivers a harsh and false message from
Antony in the hope of winning her love for himself (4.1.180). In the Prologue,
Dryden says of Antony,
He’s somewhat lewd; but a well-meaning mind;
Weeps much; fights little; but is wond’rous kind. (ll. 12–13)

79 For essays drawing attention to the importance of the work to the moral vision of Dryden’s
plays, see Wallace (1980) and Levine (1981).
80 For an important interpretation of De Beneficiis in its Neronian context, see Chaumartin (1985)
and for earlier bibliography (1989b). For more recent accounts, also see Mayer (1991) and Letta
(1997–98).
81 L’Estrange (1679) 1–2, 2–3, vi, x.    82 Levine (1981) 247.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 289

Perhaps Dryden wanted to disguise the significance of this portrayal with his
jaunty tone, but it expresses Dryden’s purpose to a turn: Antony’s inclinations are
generous, he is kind, and these virtues overbalance his sexual license.
Nouns that imply a relationship of mutual obligation such as friend, lover, father,
husband, and emperor are also common in the drama. Their importance is suggested
most clearly in Act 3 when Antony’s Roman friends and family surround him and
urge their mutual ties in quick succession:
Ven. Was ever sight so moving! Emperor!
Dolla. Friend!
Octav. Husband!
Both Childr. Father! (3.1.361–2)
One of the reasons that Dryden wants his characters to shed tears and embrace
each other so often is because he wants to emphasize that the economy of benefits
is not the “mere driving of a Trade” but the “Cultivating of a generous Commerce”
in which it is the affect that counts, not the service rendered or the good bestowed.83
Antony despises Octavius because “Nature meant him for a Userer” (3.1.214),
someone who bestows only when he is sure of a return. In the first four acts,
Ventidius, Dollabella, Octavia, and even Alexas make the case for preserving
one’s honor or pursuing one’s interest. What Antony, Cleopatra, and even Venti-
dius learn during the course of the tragedy is to place less weight on interest and
honor than on love. Antony imagines himself, in contrast to Octavius, as Seneca’s
merchant adventurer of benefits. “I’m like a Merchant, rows’d / From soft repose,
to see his Vessel sinking, / And all his Wealth cast o’er,” he says when he thinks
that Cleopatra has betrayed him, but word of her death is enough to persuade
him to go to sea once again (5.1.206–8). And in the end, Ventidius behaves the
same way. No matter how often his emperor is ungrateful or imprudent, he serves
him like a friend. Dryden meant it when he entitled his tragedy All for Love; or
the World Well Lost, but the love he had in mind was a great deal more pervasive
than Antony and Cleopatra’s: It was the cement of a society founded on benefits,
a society whose demise men like the earl of Clarendon mourned as they would
mourn the dead.

T R A G E D Y A N D H I S TO RY

Although Antony and Cleopatra was not performed using anything like the original
text until 1849, the historical turn that philosophy and literary criticism took in
the late eighteenth century had already prepared the way for its reception as tragic
drama—if not live theater—long before that date. For in contrast to Sidney and
Dryden, who ranked the particulars of history beneath the universals of philosophy
in dignity, Herder and Hegel began to look for the revelation of Spirit in the historical
record. What is striking about Herder’s “Shakespeare” (1773) is the praise he heaps

83 L’Estrange (1679) 86.

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290 What Was Tragedy?

on the English dramatist for making every play he wrote “History in the widest
sense”: “In the end, each play remains and cannot but remain—what it is:
History!”84 The historical turn in philosophy promoted the notion that history
was laboring to reveal the truth in a process that entailed a progress of the con-
sciousness of freedom marked by the emergence of self-conscious and self-realizing
individuals. The generations of Herder and Hegel therefore attached great value to
Shakespeare’s representation of modern subjectivity as a historical watershed.
Whereas the ancients had believed in a fatality that destroyed them like a thunder-
bolt, explained Schlegel’s patroness Madame de Staël, Shakespeare had plumbed
the modern experience more deeply, depicting the distress that could arise from
ineffectual exertions, blighted hopes, and spiritual self-division.85 His history
plays, which looked like mere chronicles to neo-Aristoteleans, could now be admired
by Adam Müller as “eight portraits of untold greatness taken from British history
which form a single coherent tragic action.”86
Two persuasions lay behind this new-found enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s his-
tory plays. The first was that, if tragedy was to remain a viable genre in the modern
world, then dramatists would have to pit the freedom of the individual against
the forces of political necessity or historical change rather than fate. Napoleon
said as much to Goethe, remarking that “contemporary tragedy was to be essen-
tially differentiated from ancient tragedy in that we no longer have a destiny that
supports human beings, and that in the place of this ancient fatum politics has
entered.”87 Friedrich Schiller, Goethe, Victor Hugo, and Georg Büchner all took
the observation to heart as they wrote the tragic histories Don Carlos (1787), Egmont
(1788), Mary Stuart (1800), Wallenstein (1800), Cromwell (1827), and Danton’s
Death (1835).
The second persuasion that raised critical estimates of Shakespeare’s history
plays—and changed the way we interpret his tragedies—was that history and tra-
gedy exhibit common formal properties. We find this claim nascent in the writings
of Adam Müller. Citing Friedrich Schlegel’s observation that England had “dealt in
advance and single-handedly with all the revolutions that Europe as a whole [had]
been forced to undergo,” Müller claimed that British history was itself “a drama in
which Europe might find its own history reflected in coherent and idealized form.”
He then added that study of “the dramatic character of the British constitution,”
which united a monological element in the shape of king, clergy, and aristocracy
with the dialogical element in the shape of the House of Commons “to form a
single beautiful and dramatic whole” was “a fine preparatory exercise for the dra-
matic poet” because it would teach him not to become engrossed in monologic
contemplation of a single hero but to let his attention be seized continually by new

84 Herder, “Shakespeare” (1773) in Nisbet, ed. (1985) 175.

85 Ann Louise Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions
social (1800), trans. as A Treatise on Ancient and Modern Literature, 2 vols. (1803), excerpts in Bate, ed.
(1992) 79.
86 Adam Müller, “Fragments Concerning William Shakespeare” (1806), trans. Louise Adey in
Bate, ed. (1992) 85.
87 Quoted by Menke (1996) 9.
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 291

ones (a lesson that could not be farther from Dryden’s advice that “all the Lines
from the Circumference” must tend only to the “Hero of the Piece”).88
Hegel’s view of history was, in certain respects, darker than Müller’s: He saw a
panorama of sin and suffering in which the very inadequacy of things as they were
lay the groundwork for the individual exercise of moral freedom. To be sure, those
who attempted to impose their private desires and personal conceptions of the
good on society usually fared no better than the typical tragic hero; but the con-
flicts of history produced the very gain that Hegel found in tragedy, for Spirit came
forth exalted and glorified.89 This is the theory that A. C. Bradley developed with
brilliant clarity and sensitivity in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), thus naturalizing
the relationship between history and tragedy for the twentieth century.
The philosophy of history that underwrote the most persuasive accounts of
literary history produced in the nineteenth century helped to secure Shakespeare’s
place in the canon as the poet who “wrote the text of modern life.”90 For the aes-
thetic autonomy that Shakespeare exercised as an artist and conferred on his
dramatic characters, endowing them with “intelligence and imagination” so that
they might “contemplate themselves objectively as a work of art,” thus becoming
“free artists of themselves,” allied his art with the distinction of character and
­autonomy of personhood that moderns considered their birthrights.91 Yet they
could not escape the suspicion that Shakespeare had enjoyed “the advantage of
living in a true time of harvest” that had past.92 Writers ranging from William
Hazlitt, through John Stuart Mill, to Richard Wagner recorded their distress that,
thanks either to the influence of a state machinery that had “put everything into
regulation livery” or simply to the rise of mass civilization, men had “lost more and
more of their plastic individuality” and now seemed to lack the characteristics that
might distinguish them.93 By contrast, “the characters of men were harshly marked,
and separated by abrupt distinctions” in the Elizabethan Age, said John Addington
Symonds with a note of longing: “They had not been rubbed down by contact and
culture into uniformity.”94
The weightiest historical account of early modernity that is generated, at least in
part, by such a despair over the degeneration of culture as a result of nationaliza-
tion, industrialization, and the rise of mass culture is Jacob Burckhardt’s.95 Rather
than present a teleological account of history as Hegel and Marx do, Burckhardt
treats ancient Greece and the European Renaissance as intervals of free play between
periods of oppression. According to Burckhardt, the Renaissance saw a breakdown
of the religious spirit and the flourishing of individuals who, whether as artists or

88 Müller, “Fragments Concerning William Shakespeare” (1806) in Bate, ed. (1992) 85; Parallel, of
Painting and Poetry (1695) in Dryden (1956–89) 20: 66.
89 See Hayden White (1975) 81–131.
90 Emerson (1995 [1850]) 142.    91 Hegel (1920) 4: 337.
92 “Shakespeare ad infinitum” (Shakespeare und kein Ende) (1815) in Goethe (1921) 183.
93 Opera and Drama in R. Wagner (1895–99) 2: 61; Holbrook (2010) 124.
94 Symonds (1900 [1883]) 23.
95 Carl Spitteler reports of Burckhardt, “The saying I heard most often from his lips was: ‘The
world is thoroughly evil.’” For a rich account of Burckhardt in historical context, see Gossman (2000)
qt. on 201.
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292 What Was Tragedy?

princes, imposed their own creative egos on the world. The creation of the modern
state in the eighteenth century put a period to that flourishing by narrowing the
scope of such personal exertions.96 This vision of the Renaissance has had a long
life. It informs Nietzsche’s contrast between renaissance aristocrats (who, like the
ancient Greeks, enjoyed a healthy self-regard) and modern men (who feel nothing
but disgust at themselves).97 It lies behind Max Weber’s influential argument that
the rise of modern science and bureaucracy has led to a “disenchantment” of the
world.98 And it is one of the inspirations of New Historicism’s synchronic and
aesthetic historicism, which tends to chart the interplay of human autonomy with
the compulsive force of social institutions such as the family, the church, and the
state in the fashioning of identity.99 It has even inflected our understanding
of Dryden’s dramaturgy. In an influential essay of the mid-twentieth century,
R. J. Kaufmann locates All for Love at a point of historical transition, when “a
heroism of service and representative initiative was replacing older conceptions of
individual honor and virtú.” According to Kaufmann, Dryden lacked the “tragic
writer’s necessary belief in the constructive possibilities of the hero’s creative defi-
ance of a meaningful social order which he must resist and which, by resisting, he
redirects.” Dryden does not deny such heroism, writes Kaufmann, but he distances
it safely into the past, effectively embalming and memorializing it: “His heroic
stage is a museum of vital feelings honored lest they be forgotten but securely pre-
served from present use.”100
Whether they hail Shakespeare as the inventor of the human, or look to his plays
for the record of a more authentic existence that preceded the ruins of modernity,
such historical narratives promote an identification of historical process with tragic
conflict or with a terminal decline from which there is no escape short of apoca-
lypse. In Theodor Adorno’s influential formulation, the horror of history affirms
Hegel’s belief in a universal history while standing him on his head: “If he transfig-
ured the totality of historic suffering into the positivity of the self-realizing absolute,
the One and the All that keeps rolling to this day—with occasional breathing
spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.”101 The ironic consequence
of this historical trajectory is, according to many accounts, that history has over-
taken tragedy as a genre.102 So Raymond Williams has one of his characters in a
dialogue assert, “We have abandoned the tragic universe, and we’ve lived past the
tragic hero. [But] we have reached, definitively, the tragic society. . . . Tragedy has, if
you will, broken out of its frame.”103 Can we write tragedy after history has staged
the Holocaust? ask critics. Can we realistically manage anything more than minima
moralia?104

96 Burckhardt (1960 [1860]); and Hayden White (1975) 230–64.

97 Nietzsche (1964) pt. 9.    98 “Science as a Vocation” (1918) in Weber (2009).
99 The best known example is Greenblatt (1980).
100 R. J. Kaufmann (1962) 87–9.    101 Adorno (1973) 320.
102 See, for example, Krieger (1960) and Simon (1989) 37.
103 Raymond Williams (1962) 26.    104 Adorno (1971).
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History as Tragedy, Tragedy as Design 293

“Tragedy,” asserts Walter Kaufmann,

is inspired by a faith that can weather the plague, whether in Sophoclean Athens or in
Elizabethan London, but not Auschwitz. It is compatible with the great victories of
Marathon and Salamis that marked the threshold of the Aeschylean age, and with the
triumph of the Armada that inaugurated Shakespeare’s era. It is not concordant with
Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Tragedy depends on sympathy, ruth, and involve-
ment. It has little appeal for a generation that, like Ivan Karamazov, would gladly
­return the ticket to God, if there were a god. Neither in Athens nor in our own time
has tragedy perished of optimism: its sickness unto death was and is despair.105
Suspended over this abyss of his own making, the philosopher commences the
heroic if melancholy task of self-authorization. Readers of contemporary literary
theory and cultural criticism are so accustomed to this move that we may scarcely
notice its structural debt to the post-Kantian philosophy of the tragic, a philosophy
that defines the tragic as a pre-philosophical examination of the metaphysical
problem of self-authorization: Cultural criticism and the philosophy of tragedy
move in a hermeneutic circle.
My foremost aim in writing this book has been to demonstrate that the phil-
osophy of the tragic is an obstacle to our interpretation of most of the tragedy
that was produced in early modern Europe between about 1515 and 1795. In this
chapter, I have explored some of the chief reasons why appreciation of Shakespeare
has thriven under the same interpretive regime. My primary concern has not been
to refute the absolutist spiritualist principles that underwrite so much post-
modern theory, but it bears saying that if we can provisionally accept the early
modern normative description of tragedy that I have attempted to reconstruct,
we will find ourselves liberated from those principles and able to ask ourselves
afresh what makes human existence—or more properly, one aesthetic framing
of human existence—tragic. Is it the vulnerability of virtue and the variability of
fortune? The measurement of time’s passage by suffering? For the early moderns,
no answer ­ignoring our capacity to feel deeply, to compassionate, and to reflect
could be satisfactory, for the vehement passions that tragedy represented and
moved were an essential part of life lived and seen in its tragic aspect.
105 Walter Kaufmann (1968) 166.
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Index
absolute, the 16, 18, 31, 39, 164, 201, Anderson, Benedict 42
251, 292 Andrewes, Lancelot 80
abyss, the 39, 195, 202 Andromeda 170, 174
academies: Angiolini, Gasparo 52, 146, 148, 179
Alterati 65, 180 anthropology and accounts of tragedy 6,
Animosi 146 n. 134 34–7, 75
Arcadian 97, 146, 178 Antigone 170
del Cardinale di San Giorgio 62 Antoinette, Marie 149
Incogniti 162 Apolline 6, 30–4, 152, 202, 248, 251–2
Achilles 112, 117, 119, 131, 175, 197 Apollo 28, 30–4, 52–3, 120–1, 150, 152
Achilleus, Saint 229–30 apparatus: see spectacle
action 9, 13, 25, 32, 38, 59, 66, 68, 71, 74, Appius 122
82–3, 123–4, 129, 130–8, 145, 159, 176, Apuleius 6, 52
190, 220, 261 Archelaus 177
Aristotle’s definition of 16, 21, 213, 226 aria 80, 82–3, 150–1, 162, 175–6, 178, 187,
early modern definition of 16, 70, 132–3 189, 191, 193–4, 198, 282
as gesture and stage movement 47, Ariadne 9, 111, 173 n. 38, 176
68, 194 Aristides Quintilianus 168
idealist definition of 5, 16–17, 160 Aristophanes 69 n. 46, 167
acting 66, 68, 85–92, 186 Frogs 170, 172, 176
Actium 263, 267 Women at the Thesmophoria 177
Addison, Joseph 11, 14, 105 Aristophon 118
Adorno, Theodor W. 55, 163–4 Aristoteleanism 7, 29, 40, 106, 146, 204, 250,
Admetus 125, 149 258, 260, 265, 273, 290
Aegisthus 13 Aristotle 6–7, 13, 21, 26, 29, 46 n. 195, 63,
Aeneas 122–3 67, 213, 264–5, 277
Aeschylus 5, 8, 21–3, 26–34, 51, 140, 160, Metaphysics 62
165–7, 169–70, 172–3, 225, 245 Nichomachean Ethics 63, 205, 210, 261
Eumenides 15, 93, 225 Poetics 6–11, 17, 37, 44–5, 57–62, 68–73,
Libation Bearers 210 76, 78, 92–3, 102, 107, 111–12, 122,
Oresteia 22, 27, 248 126–30, 135–6, 153, 167–8, 180–1, 183,
Persians 165, 170 208–14, 240–6, 259, 261
Prometheus Bound 17, 22, 93 Politics 63, 65, 70 n. 53, 138–9, 144–5,
Aesopus 90 167–8
Agamemnon 79, 112, 114, 116, 123, 176, Problems 167–9
190, 210 Rhetoric 63, 70, 73, 103, 107, 112, 137
agency 5, 16, 37–40, 75–6, 79, 259–60 Armida 186
Ajax 112–17, 126, 161, 170, 196, 270 Arnold, Matthew 12
Alcestis 120–2, 175, 243, 245 Arteaga, Esteban de 98–9
Alembert, Jean de Rond d’ 67 Artemis 174, 197, 224 n. 81
Alexander the Great 176, 244–5 see also: Diana
Alexandria 186, 235, 263, 279 Arthos, John 140 n. 117
Alexandrian culture 32–4, 166 artwork of the future 27–30, 34, 51
Alfieri, Vittorio 12 Ascanius, J. Badius 58
Algarotti, Francesco 47, 146, 162, 178 association of ideas 50
Altertumswissenschaft 4 Athena 112, 176
ambivalence 34–7 Athenaeus 6, 52, 68, 212
Amphion 168 Athens 5, 31, 42, 52, 67, 115–16, 165, 169–70,
Amyot, Jacques 125 172, 217, 225, 243, 258, 263, 293
Anabaptists 246 Atreus 90, 224, 245
anagnorisis: see recognition Attic tragedy 5, 7, 15, 31, 40, 42, 58, 66, 76,
ancients and moderns 20, 29, 43, 57, 111–12, 117, 137–8, 146, 148, 163–76
122, 153, 155–6, 178, 186, 249, 290 Atys 245
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356 Index
Aubignac, François Hédelin, l'abbé d’ 9, 11, Buchanan, George 7, 188, 193
84, 175–6, 178, 186 Büchner, Georg 290
Augustine, Saint 206, 209 Bude, Guillaume 183
Aulis 190 Burckhardt, Jacob 39, 56, 291
Aulus Gellius 6, 52, 91 Burgh, James 85
Aureli, Aurelio 176 Burke, Edmund 106
Auschwitz 293 Burney, Charles 187
autonomy 16, 41, 80, 259–60, 291–3 Burton, Robert 211–12
Averroës 8, 46 n. 195 Busenello, Gian Francesco 173, 176
Aylen, Leo 4 n. 11 Butcher, S. H. 242
Bywater, Ingram 62, 128
Bacchus 267
Bach, J. C. 187 Caccini, Giulio 66, 162–3
Bakunin, Mikhail 27 Cadmus 245
ballet: see dance Cahusac, Louis de 146
Bamberg 248 Cairncross, John 236
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 106 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 5, 6, 23, 177,
Barberini, Cardinal Francesco 52, 235, 243 203–5, 247–50
Bardari, Giuseppe 126 The Constant Prince 9, 225, 230–4, 247–50
Bardi, Giovanni 52, 171 n. 31, 180 Devotion of the Cross 248–9
Baronio, Cesare 229–30 Caliban 275
Barthes, Roland 35–6, 131 n. 81 Calvinism 55, 200–1
Bartoli, Giorgio 180 Calzabigi, Ranieri 148–9, 179
Bartolommei, Girolomo 235 Camerata: see Florentine Camerata
Batteux, Charles 20, 57, 111, 127, 129 Campbell, George 106
Bayreuth 29, 34 Campbell, Lily 78
Beckett, Samuel 6 Campra, André 188, 196
Beethoven, Ludwig von 29, 33 canon of early modern tragedy 6–7, 33, 37,
Bellarmine, Robert 252 162–6, 200–5, 250–2, 258–61, 289–93
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 259 n. 7, 274 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 274
Belvedere Torso 18 Carthage 235
Beni, Paolo 63, 67 Cassandra 173
Benjamin, Walter 55, 163–5 Castelvetro, Lodovico 9, 67, 71, 93–4, 103,
Bergman, Igmar 180 127, 241–2
Berlin 17, 22–3, 26–7, 188 catastrophe 4, 68, 73, 111, 133 n. 89, 186, 248
Berlioz, Hector 184 see also: tragedy, happy ending in; tragedy,
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 96, 205 unhappy ending in
Betterton, Thomas 85, 89, 91, 273 catharsis 9, 17, 25, 35, 48, 57–8, 62–8, 108,
Bibiena, Francesco 99 138–9, 144–5, 167, 179, 180–1, 184–6,
Bidermann, Jacob 203 196, 209–14, 285, 288
Biet, Christian 134 and free will 15
Billings, Joshua 3 n. 1, 40 and the pleasure proper to tragedy 103
Blake, William 145 Catholic Church 246
Bloom, Harold 268–9 Catullus 172
Bodin, Jean 78 Caussin, Nicolas 212, 215, 222
Bodoaro, Giacomo 175 Cavallerino, Antonio 12
Boethius 8, 213 Cavalli, Francesco 7, 146 n. 134, 173, 176
Boileau, Nicholas 136 n. 99 Cave, Terence 40, 57, 131
Bologna 99, 177 Cavendish, Margaret 49
Bordes, Jean de 126 Cellot, Louis 211
Börtz, Daniel 180 Celsus 234–5
Bouchard, Jean-Jacques 52 ceremony 112, 121, 124–6, 182
bourgeois drama 106–8, 112, 147, 153–4 Cervantes, Miguel de 154, 203
Bradley, A. C. 4–5, 10, 25–6, 269, 272, 291 Ceuta 231, 233
Brecht, Bertolt 40 Chamillard, Étienne 251
Bretonneau, François 251 Champmeslé, Marie 86
Brillaud, Jérôme 3 Chancel, Lagrange de 12
Brooks, Cleanth 44 change of fortune 73, 126, 130 n. 73, 240, 258
Brumoy, Pierre 112, 122, 146, 155 Chappuzeau, Samuel 85
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 07/28/2015, SPi

Index 357
character 22, 48–51, 69–72, 75–6, 100–1, crime 15, 34–5 n. 151, 38, 73, 217, 221,
259–60, 264–5, 268, 273, 277–8, 291 223, 249
see also: ēthos; manners Crispus 214–30
character criticism 26, 75–6, 80, 252, Cumberland, Richard 143
268–9, 277–8 Cyprien, Saint 234
Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and
Ireland 273 Dacier, André 59, 62, 74–5, 100, 102,
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 229 127, 241
Charpentier, Marc-Antoine 82, 178, 251 Dal Prato, Vincenzo 189, 192
Châteaubrun, Jean Baptiste Vivien de 153–4 Danaus, daughters of 245
Chaucer, Geoffrey 11 dance 47–8, 52, 68, 102, 146, 148, 151, 162,
Cherubini, Luigi 179 167, 170, 174, 186–7, 189, 192, 197–8,
Chiabrera, Gabriello 203 203, 225–30, 244, 251–2
chorus 21, 30–4, 40, 44–5 n. 151, 48, 51, 66, Danchet, Antoine 188, 191, 196
69, 93, 99–102, 114–26, 140–5, 150–2, Dante 181, 248
155–6, 160–1, 167–9, 171–2, 174–5, Danti, Vincenzo 45
177, 182, 184, 186–7, 189, 191–6, Davenant, Sir William 265, 283
219–20, 223, 225–30, 244, 251 death in tragedy 9, 15, 18, 25–6, 30–2, 36, 71,
Christianity 16, 23, 27–9, 34, 55, 200–57 74–5, 83, 105, 111, 115, 117, 121–2,
Cicero 6, 52, 123, 167, 213, 288 124, 141, 151–2, 161, 179, 181, 183–5,
Cicognini, Andrea 146 n. 134 192–5, 197, 233, 238–40, 242, 247–51,
Clairon, Mademoiselle 96 270, 272, 280
clarification: see catharsis Decius 235, 238
class: see social rank Delidel, Claude 235, 239
classical v. romantic 21, 23 Della Casa, Giovanni 66
Clement of Alexandria 234 Delphi 52
Cleopatra 9, 264–72 Delrio, Martin 11, 94–5, 128, 214, 225, 243
climate 43, 76–8 Demetrius 274
Clytemnestra 101, 147, 175, 182, 190, 210 democracy 252
Coffeteau, Nicholas 212 demons 76, 216–17, 230, 253
Cohen, Walter 43 Dennis, John 100, 286
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 21, 26, 260, Denores, Giason 144
272, 283 Dent, Edward 198
Collège Louis-le-Grand 251 De Piles, Roger 72
Collegio Romano 204, 214–15, 217, 230, 243 De Sanctis, Franceso 42
collision: see tragedy, conflict in Descartes, René 96, 103, 105, 146, 196,
comedy 9, 13, 19, 49, 58, 60, 68, 165, 213, 278
198, 244 Desdemona 10, 47, 79, 106
Constantine the Great 215–30 design 19, 44–7, 166, 189, 259–60, 276
conversion 135, 210, 236, 248 destiny: see tragedy, fate in
Cooper, Anthony-Ashley, third earl of deus ex machina 32, 95, 120, 139, 142, 152,
Shaftesbury 105 154, 176–7, 183, 185–6
Corneille, Pierre 5, 10, 63, 67, 106, 115, 132, development, of character or themes 50–1, 75,
152, 177, 198, 203, 205, 223, 268 259, 278
Le Cid 10, 81, 136 Diana 182–4
Nicomède 155 dianoia 69–72, 123, 128–9, 213
Polyeucte 126, 129 n. 70, 204, 210, 225, diction: see language of tragedy
234–40, 246–7, 251 Diderot, Denis 86, 107, 133, 146, 148, 153,
Tite et Bérénice 130–1 156, 178, 203
Corneille, Thomas 130, 178, 203 Dido 9, 122–3, 131, 173, 176
Cornford, F. M. 35 Dietrich, Albrecht 35
Corsi, Jacopo 180 Diomedes 8, 58
Counter-Reformation 23, 246 Dionysian 30–4, 163, 202, 248, 251–2
court theater 5, 29, 42–3 Dionysus 30–5, 102, 176
Coypel, Antoine 261 discernment of spirits 208, 210, 221
Crébillon, Claude Prosper Jolyot de 188 see also: Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises
Creon 170 disegno: see design
Crescimbeni, Giovanni Maria 146 n. 134 Dodds, E. R. 35 n. 153
Cressoles, Louis de 92 Dolce, Lodovico 72
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358 Index
Dominic, Saint 206 Cretan Men 170, 245
Domitilla, Saint 229–30 Cretan Women 170
Donati, Alessandro 14, 68, 70, 74, 89, 205, and death of tragedy 22, 28, 31–3
209, 213–14, 220, 245–6, 250 Electra 170–1, 178, 185
Donatus, Aelius 8, 10, 13, 59, 167 Hecuba 34, 127, 171, 178–9
Doni, Giovanni Battista 180 Helen 171, 174, 178
Donizetti, Gaetano 126 Heracles 140
Dort, Bernard 238 n. 104 Hippolytus 11, 21–2, 71, 128, 171, 174–5,
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Brothers Karamazov 5 178, 210, 245, 249
Drake, James 49 Ion 11, 21, 171, 174
drama of reconciliation 13 Iphigenia among the Taurians 11, 13–14,
Dresden 27, 180, 197–8, 293 103, 111, 123, 127, 135, 174, 178–87
Droysen, Johann Gustave 27 Iphigenia in Aulis 171, 175–6, 178–9,
Dryden, John 7, 11, 45, 49, 56, 70 n. 52, 185, 187
72–3, 76, 80, 83, 106, 210, 268, 289, 292 Medea 22, 34, 127, 173–4, 178–9
All for Love 56, 260, 262, 273, 276, 282 n. 68 music of 32–3, 167–76
Aureng-Zebe 83–4, 273, 278 Orestes 11, 171–2, 178
Heads of an Answer to Rymer 80, 273 Phoenician Women 171
Oedipus 107, 273 Rhesus 176
Essay of Dramatick Poesie 70 n. 52, 72 n. 60, Suppliant Women 66
81, 258, 261, 265 n. 25, 272–3, 278 Trojan Women 16, 22, 34, 171, 176
Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy 49, 70 n. 52, Eustachius, Saint 9
72 n. 60, 84, 210, 262, 265 n. 25, Evanthius 10
277–8, 283 existentialism 4
Parallel, of Poetry and Painting 259, 274, 291
Rival Ladies 265 n. 25 Fabian, Pope 235
Troilus and Cressida 273, 283 fable 19, 44–6, 66, 69–75, 80, 101, 126–30,
Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, l’abbé 86, 104–5, 136, 138 n. 109, 232, 241, 258
130, 136 complex 126–31, 179–99
Dufresnoy, Charles Alphonse 276 episodic 128
Durazzo, Giacomo Conte 148 simple 111–56
Falstaff 50, 272
Eagleton, Terry 4 n. 11, 40 Farinelli 12, 175
education 76 fate: see tragedy, fate in
Electra 170, 180, 191, 196 Faustus 200 n. 4
Eliot, T. S. 284 Fénelon, François 121, 155, 188–9, 196
Elizabeth I, Queen of England 5, 42 Ferdinand I, Grand Duke of Florence 52
Elizabethan tragedy 4, 5, 42, 81, 202, 258, 272 Ferrara 58, 177
Else, Gerard 13 n. 49, 62, 73, 127–8, 240–1 Feuerbach, Ludwig 27
Empson, William 44 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 15, 23–4, 26–7
Engel, Johann Jacob 50 Filippi, Bruna 213
epic 60–1, 127–9, 245 Flaubert, Gustave 39
error: see hamartia Florence 71, 163, 180
ethical tragedy 126–30 Florentine Camerata 163, 180
ēthos 38, 49, 69–72, 75–9, 117, 129, 206, 213, Florio, John 45, 258
265, 277 Folk, the 20, 28–30, 33
see also: character; manners Fontenelle, Bernard de Bovier le 130
Etymologicum Magnum 68 Ford, John 83
Euneus 168 fortune 69, 138, 193, 293, 231, 250–1, 286
Euripides 8, 10, 12, 17, 21–3, 26, 34–5, 51–3, see also: chance; change of fortune
55, 67, 102, 123, 134–5, 140, 152, 162, Foucault, Michel 38
165–79, 197, 214, 252, 273 Francis of Assisi, Saint 206
Alcestis 11, 111, 120–2, 124–5, 129, 171, Freccero, John 248
176, 178–9, 185, 190 freedom: see liberty; tragedy, freedom v.
Andromache 11, 171–2, 176, 178 necessity in
Andromeda 170, 176–7 free will 14–15, 17–18, 21, 38, 151, 208, 213,
Bacchae 22, 31, 35, 35 n. 153, 180 222, 239–40, 242, 251
Children of Heracles 243 see also: grace; liberty; tragedy,
Cresphontes (or Merope) 12, 13, 181 freedom v. necessity in; will
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Index 359
French Revolution 3, 26 Gravina, Gian Vincenzo 7, 176, 178
Freud, Sigmund 4, 34–7 Greek art 14, 19, 27–8, 31, 51, 156–61
Greenblatt, Stephen 39, 54
Galen 76–7, 211–12 Greene, Thomas M. 226, 228–9
Galilei, Vincenzo 168, 172 Gregory the Great, Pope 205
Galluzzi, Tarquinio 13, 72, 94–5, 204–5, 209, Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint 234
213–14, 217, 225–6, 241, 243–6, 250 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Baron von 188
Galuppi, Baldassare 188 Grotius, Hugo 7
Garrick, David 83, 86, 89, 146, 148, 258 Gryphius, Andreas 203
Gasparini, Francesco 12 Guadagni, Gaetano 148
Gassmann, Florian Leopold 12 Guarini, Battista 13
Gautier, Théophile 136 Guillard, Nicolas-François 181
Genesius, Saint 210 guilt 16, 34–7, 240
genius 25, 44 see also: pollution
Geoffroy, Julien-Louis 154 Gulick, Charles Burton 212
geography 43, 76–9
geohumoralism 43, 78–9 Hall, Edith 173, 175
Germanic spirit 23–34, 41–3, 202 Halliwell, Stephen 64, 74
Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von 159 hamartia 17, 37, 73–5, 132, 243–4, 272
Gertrude 89, 95 Hamburg 5
Gervinus, Georg Gottfried 42 Hamlet 10, 26, 33, 50, 78, 81, 86, 89, 272
Gesumtkunstwerk 29, 48 Handel, George Frideric 82, 148
Ghirardelli, Jean-Baptista 214 n. 62, 223 Hanslick, Eduard 198
Giacomelli, Geminiano 12, 175 Harbage, Alfred 42
Giacomini, Lorenzo 14, 65–6, 70 n. 52, 92, Harmodius and Aristogeiton 244
103, 144, 172, 180, 183, 185 Harrison, Jane 35
Gibbon, Edward 215 Hart, Charles 86
Gildon, Charles 81 Hasse, Johann Adolph 82
Gill, Christopher 76 Hathaway, Baxter 63
Giraldi, Giovan Battista 11, 13–14, 58–9, 103, Hawkins, A. H. 129
118, 168, 225 Hayley, William 145
Orbecche 9 Hazlitt, William 26, 50, 260, 267, 291
Giutti, Francesco 177 Heartz, Daniel 194
Glotz, Gustave 241 Hector 114
Gluck, Christoph Willibald 7, 12, 29, 43, 56, Hecuba 84, 90, 173–4
148, 153, 179, 197 Hegel, G. W. F. 6, 10, 15–20, 23, 26–7, 31,
Alceste 14, 54, 111, 148–52, 156, 179, 187, 38, 40, 50–1, 123, 164, 201–2, 250,
192, 194–5 275, 289–93
Iphigénie en Aulide 152, 179, 187, 192, 197 Heinsius, Daniel 9, 11, 64–5, 74, 128, 130,
Iphigénie en Tauride 152, 175, 179, 181–4, 187 137, 138 n. 109, 142, 209
Orfeo e Euridice 148 Helgerson, Richard 43
God 36, 39, 41, 55, 67, 141–2, 145, 211, 233, Hellenistic theater 48, 52, 55, 170, 177, 186
237–9, 242, 249, 259, 293 Henriette d’Angleterre 130
gods 32, 38, 76, 84, 95, 102, 107, 114, 120, Henry the Navigator 230
127–8, 142, 150–1, 164, 172, 184–5, Heracles 18, 112, 117–18, 120–1, 135, 142, 152,
188, 191, 194–6, 249 155, 159, 170, 174, 243, 249, 267, 269–70
Goethe, J. W. von 5, 20–1, 30, 47, 51, 160, see also: Hercules
247–8, 290 Hercules 243, 245
Götz von Berlinchingen 24 see also: Heracles
Iphigenie auf Tauris 12, 14 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 19–20, 27, 53,
Golden, Leon 64 158–9, 197, 258, 261, 289–90
Goldhill, Simon 26, 40–1, 119 Hermann, Gottfried 57
Golding, Arthur 288 hermeneutics of suspicion 54
Goldmann, Lucien 5, 200 Hermes Trismegistus 67
Goldoni, Carlo 203 hero, tragic 16–18, 25–6, 30–2, 34–5, 38–9,
Goulston, Theodore 59 41, 55, 69, 101, 105–8, 117, 138, 164,
grace 140 n. 117, 208, 222, 233–6, 239–40, 168, 234, 240, 242, 249, 252, 290–2
242, 246–7, 249, 251 Heron of Alexandria 6
controversy over 55, 208, 211, 239, 249 Hesiod 243
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360 Index
Heyne, Christian Gottlieb 19 Jommelli, Niccolò 12, 187
Hippocrates 76–8 Jones, John 16, 74
Hippolytus 48, 71–2, 153, 174–5, 210, 220, Jonson, Ben 49, 258, 265
224, 242–3, 249 Julius Pollux 6, 52–3
Hiroshima 293
Hobbes, Thomas 105, 108, 196, 230 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 106
Hoffman, E. T. A. 248 Kant, Immanuel 3, 14–16, 18, 26, 33, 37,
Hoffmansthal, Hugo von 180 39–40, 108, 164, 207, 250
Hölderlin, Friedrich 15, 18, 84, 250 Karlsruhne 198
Holderness, Graham 43 Karl Theodor, Prince-Elector of Palatine and of
Holy Roman Empire 227 Bavaria 187, 197
Holzbauer, Ignaz 187 Kaufmann, R. J. 292
Homer 31, 60, 165, 243 Kaufmann, Walter 13 n. 49, 200 n. 3
Iliad 5, 114, 128–9 Kaunitz, Prince Wenzel Anton 148
Odyssey 128–9 Kayser, Wolfgang 232
Horace 6, 51–2, 57, 147, 264–5, 277 Kemble, Charles 273
Art of Poetry 8, 49, 75–6, 89, 94, 104, 131, Kitto, H. D. F. 185
154, 167, 225, 245 Knapp, Jeffrey 43
Hugo, Victor 290 Knights, L. C. 269
Hume, David 50 Krauss, Clemens 198
humors 43, 49–50, 65, 76–9, 85–6, 211, 273 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 9
Hurd, Richard, bishop of Worcester 104
Hutcheson, Frances 106 Lacan, Jacques 38 n. 165
Lactantius 215
Iago 79 Lady Macbeth 10
Ibsen, Henrik 6, 34 La Flèche 213
Idealism 3–7, 9, 19, 26, 37–41, 54, 99–100, La Harpe, Jean-François de 85, 113, 116, 119
139, 197, 204, 247–50 Philoctète 54, 111, 152–6
Idomeneus 176, 187–99 Lamb, Charles 47, 50–1
Ignatius of Loyola, Saint 205–8, 234 lament 17, 66–7, 82–3, 92, 101, 112–16,
Spiritual Exercises 205–14, 238 119–23, 137, 150, 152, 158, 170–2,
immortality, its consolation in conflict with 174–7, 182, 194, 232, 243, 253–4
tragic effect 14, 201 La Mesnardière, Hippolyte Jules Pilet de 84
individuality of dramatic persons 19, 28–31, language of tragedy 18–19, 21, 58–9, 61, 68,
37, 49, 51, 56, 191, 259, 265 79–81, 84–5, 112, 118, 122, 131–5, 155,
Ingegneri, Angelo 47 176, 180, 224, 273, 283–6
Ionesco, Eugène 6 Lanson, Gustave 42
Iphigenia 123, 175, 181–2, 190, 192, 243, 249 Laocoön 17
irrational, the 34 Laocoön, sculpture 18, 156–61
Isis 269, 272, 274 La Touche, Claude Guimond de 12, 183–4
Ixion 118, 126 La Tourneur, Pierre 84–5
Lear 10, 47, 80–1, 83, 89
Jacopo de Voragine 206 Leavis, F. R. 282
Jacourt, Louis de, chevalier 159 Le Bossu, René 76
Jahn, Otto 198 Le Brun, Charles 88, 158
Jameson, Ana 269 Le Cerf de La Viéville, Jean-Laurent, seigneur
Jansenism 6, 48, 55, 200–1, 205, de Fresneuse 186
235 n. 104, 239 L’Estrange, Roger 288
Jarrett-Kerr, Martin 3 n. 2, 242 Le Faucheur, Michel 91
jealousy 78–9, 83, 191 Legouis, Emile 42
Jebb, Sir Richard 25, 25 n. 108, 53, 137–8 Le Grand, Pierre 187, 189
Jena 3, 15, 20, 23, 26–7 Leipzig 27
Jephthah 176, 188 Leo, Russ 142, 145
Jerusalem 206, 230 Leo X, Pope 122
Jesuits 11, 13–14, 16–17, 25, 43, 48, 55, 65, Leo Africanus 79
68, 70, 72–4, 80, 89, 92, 94–5, 102 Lemierre, Antoine-Marin 188
n. 139, 104, 122, 126, 128, 130, 134, 155, Lemnos 117, 119, 144, 154
177, 184, 188–9, 200–57, 259, 278, 288 Le Moyne, Pierre 130
Johnson, Samuel 138 Leonard, Miriam 38
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Index 361
Leonardo da Vinci 275 Marie Antoinette 197
Le Sage, Alain René 203 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 44
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 12, 27, 43, 50, 74, Marino, Giambattista 146
106–7, 114, 153, 158, 197, 234, 246 Marlowe, Christopher 39
Lewes, G. H. 102 n. 139 Doctor Faustus 201
Lewicki, Ernst 198 Marmontel, Jean-François 17, 72, 74
liberty 17, 19, 22, 24–5, 32–3, 36, 39, 51, Mars 269, 279
100, 112, 125, 157–61, 174, 180, 207–8, Marston, John 42
222, 239, 240, 244, 251–2, 286, 290–1 Martello, Pier Jacopo 146 n. 133
Licinius 215 martyr tragedy 139, 200–52
Lillo, George 106–7 Marx, Karl 291
Lipsius, Justus 214, 217 Marx, William 40, 165
Liviera, Giambattista 12 Marxism 4, 200
Livy 122, 275 May Uprising 27
Locke, John 50 Medea 34, 46, 95, 173 n. 38, 221, 243, 245
Lodge, Thomas 288 Medici, Prince Giovanni de’ 180
Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 274 Mei, Girolamo 33, 168, 172, 180
London 5, 42 melancholy 13, 78, 149, 212, 232, 234, 277–8
Longinus 136 n. 99 melodrama 13, 41, 55, 185
Lope de Vega, Félix 203, 210–11 Melville, Herman, Moby Dick 5
Loraux, Nicole 172 Menelaus 79, 112, 114, 123
Louis XIV of France 25, 177 Menestrier, Claude-François 102 n. 139
Louis XV of France 184 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène 133 n. 89, 135
Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Messina 263
Portsmouth 286–7 metabasis: see change of fortune
Loyola 206 Metastasio, Pietro 7, 57, 99, 106, 146, 148,
Lucan 137 178, 189
Lucian 6, 52, 170, 174, 177 Michel, Laurence 200
Lucretia 220 Michelet, Jules 39
Lucretius 105, 196 Mill, John Stuart 291
Ludolph of Saxony 206 Milton, John 7, 9
Lukács, Georg 3 preface to Samson Agonistes 9, 138, 144–5
Lully, Jean-Baptiste 7, 152, 177, 186 Samson Agonistes 54, 111, 137–45
lustration 145, 183–4 Minerva 176
see also: catharsis; sacrifice Minos 245
Luther, Martin 24, 202 Minturno, Antonio Sebastiano 103
Lutheranism 203, 208, 246, 250–2 Misenum 263
Lyon 58 Modena 12
Lysippus 274 modernity 23, 27–9, 32–4, 41, 51–3, 56,
201–2, 289–93
Macaria 243 Molière 130, 154, 203, 214
Macbeth 48, 200 n. 4 Molina, Luis de 208, 249, 251–2
machines: see spectacle Montaigne, Michel de 266
Macrobius 6, 224 Montchrestien, Antoine de 126
madness 79, 112–14, 127, 131, 188, 219 Monteverdi, Claudio 7, 11, 67, 82, 140 n. 117,
Madrid 5, 177 162, 172–3, 175, 177
Maffei, Francesco Scipione 12, 203 moral instruction 100–1
Maggi, Vincenzo 8, 58–9, 62, 65 Morgann, Maurice 26, 50, 269
Magnus, Albertus 78 mourning 112, 121–2, 125, 137, 149, 152,
Malebranche, Nicholas 103 164, 172, 174, 182
manners 19, 43, 48–51, 64, 69–72, 75–9, Mozart, Leopold 187–9, 192, 197
82–3, 85, 101, 129–30, 191, 213, 226, Mozart, Nannerl 197
238, 252, 264–5, 269, 277 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 29, 82, 175
see also: character Idomeneo 166, 175, 187–99
Mannheim 178, 187 Don Giovanni 198
Mantua 177 Mueller, Martin 138
Marcus Aurelius 230 Müller, Adam 290
Marenzio, Luca 52 Muller, Herbert Joseph 202
Mariana, Juan de 252 Munich 175, 187, 189, 192, 203
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362 Index
Muratori, Ludovico 146 n. 134 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 33
Murray, Gilbert 35, 35 n. 153 Palisca, Claude 163, 185–6
mūthos 129 Pallavicino, Pietro Sforza 205, 215, 242
see also: fable; plot Pampeluna 205
pantomime, tragic 52, 68, 146–8, 150, 179,
Nagasaki 293 194, 248, 251
naïve and sentimental 30–1, 51–3 see also: chorus; dance
Naples 227 Panzacchi, Domenico de’ 193
Napoleon 5, 23, 26, 30, 290 papacy 202–3, 219, 230
Napolitano, Michele 163 Paris 153, 175, 177, 181, 187–8, 203
nationalism 21, 26–34, 41–4, 166, 197–9, 252 Parker, L. P. E. 121
Naumman, Emil 197–8 Parma 12
necessity: see tragedy, freedom v. necessity in passions 9, 19, 22, 26 n. 108, 32–4, 41, 48–51,
Neoptolemus 117, 128, 129 n. 72, 141, 155 54, 59, 62, 64–6, 70–6, 78–92, 100,
Neptune 48, 195 103–4, 106, 111–12, 122–4, 129–30,
Nereus, Saint 229–30 135–6, 138, 140 n. 117, 145–6, 156–61,
Nero 25 163, 171, 174–6, 180–1, 184, 191, 194,
New Criticism 4, 44 196, 202, 206–14, 217, 220, 226, 233,
Newton, Thomas 139, 142 237, 252, 269, 272, 277–8, 285, 288, 293
Niderst, Alain 137 actors’ performance of 85–99
Nietzsche, Friedrich 26–40, 55–6, 200–2, 292 admiration 73, 88, 103, 134, 203, 219, 237,
Birth of Tragedy 27, 30–4, 40, 163–6, 251–2 239, 246
Nilson, Martin 35 adoration 89
Niobe 160 astonishment 88
Nisard, Désiré 42 compound 83, 106
Nitsch, Hermann 35–7 contempt 89
Noiry, Michel 151 desire 106, 123, 226
Nooter, Sarah 114–15 despair 9, 111, 150, 223
Nougaret, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste 186 disgust 233
Novalis 17 n. 70 fear 4, 9, 11, 13–14, 46, 62, 64–5, 68, 74,
Noverre, Jean-George 146, 148, 179, 197 92–6, 104–8, 107, 123–4, 127, 136, 138,
Nussbaum, Martha 64 160, 181, 185, 196, 203, 208–10, 213,
Nuttall, A. D. 102 220, 226, 237, 240–2, 245, 272, 278
grief 75, 92, 104, 106, 111–12, 114, 122–3,
Odysseus 13, 112–20, 128, 141, 155 134–5, 137, 150–1, 154, 172, 182, 188,
see also: Ulysses 192–3, 208, 220, 223, 251, 272
Oedipus 15, 170, 249 hate 83, 104, 195
opera 7, 11, 25, 29, 32–4, 41, 43, 46, 48, 55, hope 9, 124, 220
57, 65, 82, 97, 102, 112, 153–4, 156, horror 14, 46, 73, 106, 116, 137, 177, 181,
162–99, 214 183, 188, 192, 208, 220, 232–3, 241–2, 249
stile rappresentativo 32–3, 65, 162–3, 180, 251 joy 11, 34, 89, 104, 123, 134, 174, 180,
opera buffa 187 192, 220
opera seria 7, 97–9, 146, 148–9, 178, 187, loathing 192
197–9 love 83, 85, 106, 124, 136, 194–5, 220,
reformed opera 7, 12, 146–52, 178–9, 187 225, 228, 237–8, 247–8, 285, 289
opsis: see spectacle lust 78
Oratorians 103 pity 9, 11, 14, 59, 62, 64–5, 68, 73–5, 92,
Orestes 13, 46, 103, 180–2, 191, 196, 210 94, 96, 103–8, 118–19, 122–4, 127,
Origen 234 136–40, 144, 149, 177, 181, 184–5, 191,
organic form 20, 29, 44, 166, 189, 259, 275, 282 193, 195, 203, 209–10, 213, 232, 241–2,
Orgel, Stephen 48 244–5, 272, 275–6, 278–9, 288
Orpheus 168 sadness 104
Osiris 269 scale of 83, 89
Othello 47, 79 sorrow 89, 106
Ottoboni, Cardinal Pietro 146 terror 9, 13, 33, 48, 59, 62, 89, 96, 103, 124,
Otway, Thomas 273 138–9, 144, 149, 162, 177, 194–6, 244
Ovid 166, 172 woe 9, 107, 113, 181–2, 192, 232
wonder 73, 88–9, 96, 98, 102, 107, 127,
pain 18, 75, 92, 117–19, 129, 150, 153, 129, 185–6, 196, 208, 213, 240, 242,
156–61, 206, 232, 247 248, 251, 263
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passive suffering 10, 126, 187, 190, 232 Pollux 167
Pater, Walter 25 n. 108 Polus 91
pathetic tragedy 126–30 Polygnotus 72
pathetic v. tragic 5, 10, 54, 111, 161, 185 Polyidos 183
pathos 8–10, 14, 17, 25, 32, 40, 50, 54–5, Polyxena 243
70–2, 74, 91, 99, 101, 111–61, 166, 172, Pope, Alexander 193, 265
174, 232, 238, 241, 250 popular theater 5, 26–30
Patrizi, Francecsco 168, 180 Port Royal des Champs 6
Paul, Saint 219 see also: Jansenism
Paul II, Pope 229 post-structuralism and accounts of tragedy 6,
Pazzi, Alessandro de’ 59, 122 37–40
Pellegrin, l'abbé Simon-Joseph 48, 178 Poussin, Nicholas 259, 261
Pelopennesian War 170 Prigent, Michel 235 n. 104
Penelope 173 primitivism 34–5
Perez, Davide 12 Procne 245
Peri, Jacopo 162–3 Prometheus 17, 93, 127
Pericles 5, 42, 51–2 Protestant Reformation 23, 201, 219, 246
peripeteia: see reversal Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 27
Perseus 170 providence 208, 222, 232, 240, 251
Perucci, Andrea 85 Prynne, William 203
Petrarch, Francesco 122 Psellus, Michael 168
Phaedra 48, 71–2, 173–5, 200 n. 4, 210, Punic Wars 122
216, 220–3 purgation: see catharsis
Phaëton 225 Puritanism 48, 203
phenomenology 4 Pye, Henry James 8, 57, 72, 130 n. 73
Philip IV, King of Spain 5
Philip of Macedon 244 Quaglio, Lorenzo 148, 187, 189
Philoctetes 111–12, 117–20, 128, 131, Quinault, Philippe 177, 186
137–45, 147, 152–61, 170 Quintilian 6, 49–50, 86, 89, 167
philosophy of history 5–6, 19–34, 37–40,
260, 289–93 Raaf, Anton 189, 192–4
philosophy of the tragic 3, 7, 14–19, 25, Racine, Jean 5, 12, 25, 29, 35, 62, 86, 101,
36–41, 108, 111–12, 126, 132, 156–61, 106, 112–16, 146, 154, 178–9, 197–8,
164, 187, 189, 200–2, 204, 250–2, 289–93 259–60, 268, 273, 282, 285
Philostratus 245 Ataliah 101
Philostorgius 215 Bérénice 54, 111, 130–7, 273, 280
Phrynicus 243–5 Britannicus 130
Phrynis 169 Esther 101
Piccini, Niccolò 179 Iphigénie 67, 147, 178, 195, 197
Piccolomini, Alessandro 9, 45, 209 Phèdre 21–2, 73, 86, 184, 220–1
Pirrotta, Nino 186 Racine, Louis 130, 153, 187, 200
Plato 17, 54, 60, 63, 67, 121, 167, 174, 180 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 48, 152, 162, 192
Minos 243–6 Ranke, Leopold von 252
pleasure: see tragedy, pleasure of Raphael 259, 275
plot 45, 64, 66, 69–75, 80, 138 n. 109, 273 Rapin, Jean 65, 73, 80, 104, 134, 152, 177,
complex 40, 55, 72–3, 111–12, 126–31, 209, 259, 278, 288
154–5, 177, 186 reception studies 6
episodic 128 recognition 8, 37, 40, 72–3, 111, 120,
simple 54, 73–5, 111–56 126, 128–9, 131, 138–9, 177, 183,
see also: catastrophe; fable; mūthos; pathos; 189, 192
recognition; reversal; tragedy, conflict in; reconciliation 4, 160, 194, 234, 248
tragedy, happy ending of; tragedy, unhappy Rees, B. R. 71 n. 53, 74 n. 72, 129 n. 70
ending of Regensburg 247
Plutarch 6, 49, 90, 167, 170, 174, 243, 260, Reichardt, J. F. 197
265–8, 276–8, 282 Reinhardt, Karl 35 n. 153
poetics of tragedy 3, 6, 8–14, 40–53, 56–108, Renaissance 23, 28, 42, 111, 122, 291
111, 204, 250 Reni, Guido 275
poet v. historian 45, 49, 72, 258–61, 289–93 repertoire, tragic 6–7, 33, 37, 162–6, 200–5,
pollution 15, 120, 240 250–2, 258–61, 289–93
see also: guilt repose 86
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364 Index
reversal 8, 72–4, 111, 120, 126, 128–9, 138–9, Schlegel, Friedrich 6–7, 19, 23, 26–7, 32, 84,
177, 183, 192 159–60, 166, 247–8, 290
rhetoric 52, 57, 84–6, 103, 129, 133, 135, Schmidt, Denis 18
180, 213–14, 224, 235 Schopenhauer, Arthur 26–34, 40, 163, 249–50
Rhode, Erwin 35 n. 135 Schröter, Corona 14
Ricchieri, Lodovico 46 Schulze, Johannes 249
Richard of St. Victor 225 Scudéry, Georges de 92, 130
Richards, I. A. 4, 44, 242 Scudéry, Madeleine de 130
Richardson, Samuel 40, 50 Seeau, Anton von 189
Richelieu, Cardinal 11–12 self-authorization 39, 293
Ricoeur, Paul 4–5, 54 Seneca 8, 13, 22, 25, 58, 166, 186, 205,
Ridgeway, William 34–5 213–14, 217, 224–6
Rinnucini, Ottavio 52, 162, 172, 180 Agamemnon 222
ritual 34–7, 112, 126, 145 Of Benefits 288–9
Rivier, André 37 Hercules furens 128, 224
Robortello, Francesco 8–9, 57–8, 62, 64–5, 71, Hercules on Mount Oeta 11, 95, 111, 243
74, 92–3, 103, 112, 126–30, 137, 168, Hippolytus (Phaedra) 220–1, 224–5
209, 226 Medea 221
Rochefort, Guillaume Dubois de 20 Octavia 214
Roman theater 52, 55, 68, 94–5, 170, 186, 217 Phoenissae 224
Roman tragedy 76 Thyestes 70 n. 51, 221, 224
romance 13, 35, 53 Troades 52, 224
Romano, Julio 259 Senesino 214
romantic drama 22–3, 29, 166 sentiments 69–72, 76, 79–84, 129, 133, 213
Rome 132, 134, 185–8, 203, 205, 217, 220, see also: dianoia; language of tragedy; passions
227, 229–30, 251–2, 279 Septimius Severus 230
Rosen, Charles 198 Serjeantson, R. W. 145
Rospigliosi, Giulio 203 Serlio, Sebastiano 59–62
Rossi, Nicolò 84, 92, 123, 177 Servius 188
Rotrou, Jean 210–11 Settle, Elkeniah 86
Rouen 235 Sewall, Richard B. 3 n. 2
Roullet, François Louis Grand LeBlanc de 149 Shakespeare, William 4–6, 10, 19–20, 23, 25,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 67–8, 149, 155 29, 44, 47–51, 56–7, 81, 85, 112, 146,
Rowe, Nicholas 81, 89, 95, 107, 262–3 153, 159, 187, 198, 202, 247, 252,
Rucellai, Giovanni di Bernardo 12, 183 258–9, 261, 275, 277, 283–6, 289–91
Rushton, Julian 195 Antony and Cleopatra 10, 56, 260–78, 281,
Russell, Bertrand 3 283–4, 289
Rymer, Thomas 11, 73, 100, 258–9, 278 Hamlet 19, 41, 50, 81, 84–6, 89–90, 95
Henry IV, Part 1 85
sacrifice 4, 123, 179–80, 183–4, 191–9, 211, Julius Caesar 85, 260
249, 252 King Lear 10, 73, 80–1, 83, 85, 89, 94, 129,
Saint-Évremond, Charles de Marguetel 130 n. 73
de Saint-Denis, seigneur de 67, 200 Macbeth 9, 26, 41, 48, 85, 201, 283
Saint-Gelais, Melin de 125 Measure for Measure 58
Salamis 115 Much Ado About Nothing 120
Salzburg 189, 197 Othello 47, 58, 73
Samuel, Irene 139, 145 Romeo and Juliet 271
Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz 11 Timon of Athens 266
Sarpi, Paolo 205 Titus Andronicus 79–80
satire 9 The Winter’s Tale 120
Scaliger, J. C. 11, 67–8 Shaw, George Bernard 34
Schelling, Friedrich 3, 6, 15–19, 21, 36–8, 57, Shuger, Debora 80
159, 161, 248–50 Siddons, Henry 94
Scherer, William 42 Sidney, Sir Philip 79, 265–6, 268, 274, 289
Schiller, Friedrich 5–6, 14–15, 17, 21, 27, 30, Sidonius Apollinaris 7, 52
33, 37, 41–2, 51, 57, 99–100, 126, 160, Sienna 209
201, 290 Silanion 118
Schlegel, A. W. 5–7, 15–17, 19–28, 31–2, 50, Silk, M. S. 250
53, 100, 108, 160–1, 166, 194, 205, 237, simple pathetic tragedy 8, 54, 111–61
247–8, 250, 290 slavery 286
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Index 365
Smith, D. Nichol 26 118, 120–3, 129, 134–5, 143–4, 153,
Snell, Bruno 37 183, 185, 193, 208, 233, 241–2, 244,
social rank 58–60, 79, 81, 84, 101, 107, 168 248–9, 282, 292–3
Socrates 23, 31–2, 34, 37, 60, 125, 174, 243 resistance to 14, 17, 22, 156–61, 193
linked to Euripides 31–2 suicide 115, 131, 134, 140, 280, 286
Sophocles 4–5, 8, 19, 21–3, 25–6, 28, 40, 51, surface reading 54
102, 140, 152, 162, 165, 214, 245 Surius, Laurentius 235
Ajax 8, 17, 54, 79, 111–17, 122, 125–31, Symeon Metaphrastes 235
134, 140–5, 147, 154–5, 160–1, 166, Symonds, John Addington 42, 291
169–70, 173, 175, 261, 273 sympathy 34–5 n. 151, 41, 96, 103, 106–8,
Antigone 19, 26 112, 116, 196, 237
Electra 26, 92, 100, 127, 174 Syria 263
Oedipus at Colonus 139, 165, 248 Szondi, Peter 3 n. 2
Oedipus the Tyrant 11, 13 n. 49, 15, 19, 73,
93, 111, 122, 127, 130–1, 134, 154, 177, tableaux 47, 112, 116, 119, 146–8, 151, 232,
215, 248 247–8, 281–2
Philoctetes 17, 22, 111–12, 117–20, 125–31, see also: tragedy, compared to painting
140–5, 147, 153–61, 173, 233 Taine, H. A. 42
Women of Trachis 16, 22, 127, 249 Tangiers 231
Sophonisba 9 Tantalus 216, 245
sorrow 106, 124, 137, 193–4 Tasso, Bernardo 145
Spanish Golden Age 202 Tasso, Torquato 124–5, 203, 246
spectacle 22, 25, 33, 47–8, 52, 61–2, 69, 92–9, tears 66–7, 135–6, 151, 153, 159, 181, 183,
102, 105, 108, 116, 125, 129, 146, 197, 209, 248, 278, 280, 288–9
162–6, 176–7, 183, 185–7, 189, 193, Terence 58
199, 202, 247–52, 281 Terradellas, Domingo Miguel Bernabe 12
spirits 80 Thamyris 168
stage machines: see spectacle theaters:
stage movement 83, 116, 132, 134, 193, 220, Blackfriars 42
234, 281 Covent Garden 273
stage sets 132 Drury Lane 86, 264, 281, 286
Staël, Madame de 23, 290 Globe 5, 42, 264, 281
Stanford, W. B. 116, 143 Hôtel de Bourgogne 130
Steadman, John M. 9, 138 Theophrastus 68
Steele, Joshua 86 Theseus 48, 71–2, 173 n. 38, 175, 192, 216,
Stefonio, Bernardino 204, 214–30, 249–50, 222, 224, 228, 242–5
253–7 Thespis 167, 243, 245
Steiner, George 4, 6, 200–1 Thomas à Kempis 212
Stendhal 154 Thomas Aquinas, Saint 37, 207–9, 213, 250–1
Stern, J. P. 250 thought: see dianoia; sentiments
Stinton, T. C. W. 13 n. 49 Thyestes 89, 243
Stockholm 180 Tillot, Guillaume Léon du 178
Stoicism 17, 41, 79, 165, 206–9, 214 Timotheus 166, 170–1
Storm and Stress movement 20, 159, 187 Tirso de Molina 203
Strauss, Richard 180, 198 Titus 131, 230
Striggio, Alessandro 179 Todd, Henry 142
Strozzi, Giovan Battista, the Younger 62, 180 Tomitano, Bernardino 8
structuralism 4, 38 Torcigliani, Michelangelo 11, 162
see also: post-structuralism Torelli, Giacomo 177
Stuart, Mary 125–6, 130 Torelli, Pomponio 12
Suárez, Francisco 252 Traetta, Tommaso 7, 12, 178–9, 187
sublime, the 4, 7, 14–15, 22, 57, 99, 136, 151, tragédie en machines 46
154, 159, 184, 201, 203, 223–4, 239–40, tragédie en musique 7, 46, 147, 153, 156,
246, 249–52, 269 177–9, 185, 187, 192, 196
mathematical v. dynamic 14, 251 see also: opera
theoretical v. practical 14 tragedy:
Suda 167, 172 antithetical structure of 3–4, 14–19,
Suetonius 167, 131 30–4, 37–40
suffering 5, 9–10, 12, 14, 16–18, 26, 33, 34–5 and capitalism and industry 27–8, 44
n. 151, 41, 46, 71, 74, 92, 100–1, 107–8, chance in 22
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366 Index
tragedy: (cont.) Venus 263, 269, 279
Christian 200–57 Verdi, Giuseppe 41
compared to drawing or painting 44, 71, Vergier de Hauranne, Jean du, abbé of
116, 146–7, 259, 262 Saint-Cyran 200
compared to sculpture 25, 28, 30–4, Vernant, Jean-Pierre 37–9, 54
156–61, 194 Vettori, Piero 9, 62, 168
conflict in 16, 18, 25, 33, 47, 123, 261 vice 76, 213, 217, 266, 277
definition of 9, 58–69, 107, 138, 167, 251 Vicenza 12
as the drama of a nation 24, 26–34, 41–4, Victorinus, Faustus 244
55, 166, 252 Vienna 20, 53, 148–9, 179, 187, 198, 203
end of 9, 46 n. 195, 62 Villars, abbé Nicolas-Pierre-Henri de
fate in 4, 15, 17, 21–2, 25, 29–30, 32, 160, Montfaucon de 131, 136
231, 242, 290 Virgil 96, 166, 188, 224, 226
freedom v. necessity in 3–4, 14–19, 21, 26, Virgin Mary 215, 222, 225, 228, 256
36–40, 55, 79, 159–61, 164, 197, 231–2, virtue 63, 65, 76, 197, 100–1, 213, 215, 217,
248, 250, 290 219, 237–8, 243, 250, 266, 277, 293
happy ending of 11, 13–14, 32, 55, 166–99 Vitruvius 7, 59
and history 56, 258–93 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de 12, 85–6,
music in 22, 26–34, 47–8, 61, 63, 68–9, 82–3, 106, 130–1, 133, 135–6, 146, 152–3,
99–102, 129, 147, 162–99, 247, 251–2 162, 203
myth and ritual accounts of 34–7 Merope 12
paradoxes of 19 Vondel, Joost van den 126
pleasure of 9, 46–7, 62–3, 102–8, 112, Vossius, Gerardus Joannes 11, 59, 68, 101, 128
125–6, 136–8, 144, 196, 246, 272, 278
as poetic art 22, 25, 47 Wagner, Richard 26–34, 51, 163, 197–8, 291
and revolution 27, 33 Parsifal 34
selfhood in 3, 7, 16, 37–40, 56, 75–9, Tristan und Isolde 27, 136
265–9 Walkington, Thomas 76–8
as theatrical art 47–8, 68 Wallerstein, Lothar 198
unhappy ending of 4, 10, 11, 30, 32, 55, Warburton, William 144
139, 181 Warton, Joseph 278
tragicomedy 13, 120 Weber, Aloisa 187
Tribschen 27 Weber, Max 292
Trissino, Gian Giorgio 7, 56, 167 Weimar 5, 21, 247–8
Poetica 126–9 Weinberg, Bernard 63
Sofonisba 54, 112, 122–6, 179, 197 Wellesz, Ego 180
Tristan l’Hermite 211, 214, 220 Whitman, Cedric 161 n. 197
Troy 114–15, 117, 120, 142, 190 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von 30–2,
Tübingen 15, 250 35 n. 153
Tucci, Stefano 214 will 16–18, 26–34, 37–40, 79, 124, 156,
Twining, Thomas 57, 127 163, 207, 213–14, 220, 231, 237–9,
tyranny 235, 243–6, 252, 286 242, 249, 251
Williams, Raymond 6, 292
Ulysses 46, 154–5, 224 Wilson, Mary Floyd 79
see also: Odysseus Winckelmann, Johannes Joachim 17–19, 27,
unities 45–6, 61–2, 69, 100, 115, 122, 146, 31, 156–61, 194, 197
258, 264, 273–6 Wittreich, Joseph, Jr. 139–40, 145
Upton, John 283 Wolff, P. A. 248
Urban VIII, Pope 243 Wright, Thomas 91
Urbino 125
Xavier, Francis, Saint 205
Valgulio, Carlo 177
Valla, Georgio 8–9 Yeats, W. B. 10
Varesco, Giambattista, abbé 175, 189, Young, Edward 20
191–2, 196
Vasari, Giorgio 44–5 Zeno, Apostolo 12, 146, 175, 178
Vatry, René 155 Zeuxis 72
Vegetius Renatus, Publius Flavius 218 Zonaras, John 215
Venice 71–2, 146 n. 134, 162, 173, Zosimus 215, 223
175–6, 185 Zuccari, Frederico 274