Hamartia in Greek Tragedy

Chapter III HAMARTIA IN GREEK TRAGEDY Philosophers and theologians through the ages have debated the question of the origin of suffering. Both Christian and Greek thought agree that man’s dignity and value are ultimately affirmed by the fact that his behaviour attracts the attention of heaven. Every generation listens to the ancient world and hears new resonances in tune with its own contingent preoccupations, and perhaps it is tragedy’s very susceptibility to reinterpretation which lends it its aura of universality. Despite the changes that have taken place in drama it remains umbilically attached to the ancient theatre. Greek tragedy has exerted such a profound influence on European art that subsequent western dramatists have not been able to avoid locating themselves either by imitation or rejection of a tradition founded by the playwrights of classical Athens. W e are not trying to interpret Shakespearean tragedy in terms of Greek aesthetic theory but it is true that in Greek tragedy too people love and hate as in Shakespearean tragedy; they protect and destroy even like the characters of a Shakespearean tragedy; like them they deceive each other or themselves. To avenge their fathers’ deaths, both Orestes and Hamlet must in turn murder another kin. Both types of plays translate the clash of will and motive and both represent human actions and convey them with intensity. So in order to understand and explore the mystery of the tragic phenomena one is naturally tempted to compare the two great forms. 58 W e ought to bear in mind that there is no simple or straightforward evolution of tragic drama. Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has served a wide variety of functions in the community. Despite the immense diversity of dram a as a cultural activity, all plays have certain elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement— in the way a novel or a poem may be— without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator can understand them. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of human behavior. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator's experience of the play and give it purpose. May be, Shakespeare, when he started writing, didn’t know what drama was. Though we were in possession of great drama before Shakespeare, it had well-nigh disappeared for nearly two thousand years ago until it emerged again fully with Shakespeare. There was no translation even of Greek drama into English. Shakespeare just like the Greeks themselves, had the great privilege to produce great drama as if from nowhere and through the medieval mysteries and miracles and the university wits, had initiated it. His drama is as extraordinary as that of the Greeks. Greek dramatists like Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides and also Shakespeare had no real models; they are peaks who rose out of nothing explicable. Human behaviour in Greek drama is not of some special, unique kind; it concerns those fundamental human limitations which are reflected to a greater or lesser degree in the literature of all nations and all periods. The form and style of 59 ancient Greek tragedy, which flowered in the 5th century BC in Athens, was dictated by its ritual origins and by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely know what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in festivals after festivals. John Henry Newman observes: . the Greek drama, as a fact, was modelled on no scientific principle. It was a pure recreation of the imagination, revelling without object or meaning beyond its own exhibition.. The very spirit of beauty breathes through every part of the composition. W e may liken the Greek drama to the music of the Italian school in which the wonder is, how so much richness of invention in detail can be accommodated to a style so simple and uniform.1 The great size of the Greek arena demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never approach the realism of modern conversational dialogue. Moreover, the dramas of the highest excellence like those of the Greeks as well as of Shakespeare are not always produced on the rules prescribed by Aristotle. According to Aristotle the excellence of tragedy depends on its plot which in turn is the exhibition of an action. But Newman opens our minds towards something which needs to be noticed: The Greek tragedians are not generally felicitous in the construction of their plots. Aristotle, then, rather tells us what tragedy should be, than what Greek tragedy really was . by reference to Aristotle’s principles, we think it will be found that the most perfect in plot is not the most poetical.2 1 John Henry Newman, Poetry With reference to Aristotle’s Poetics (1829), included in English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century), ed. by. Edmund D Jones, (Oxford University Press, London, 1916), p. 194. 2 ibid., pp.192,195. 60 Thus, the beauty and sublimity of Greek tragedy is not contingent upon the construction of the proper plot and thereby upon action. What genuinely goes into the qualities that give pleasure to the senses and the mind is in the depiction of the character, sentiments and diction. Sophocles’ greatest play, Oedipus the King, may serve as a model of the total dramatic achievement of the Greeks. Embodied in it, and suggested with extraordinary dramatic tact, are all the basic questions of tragedy, which are presented in such a way as almost to define the form itself. It is not surprising that Aristotle, a century later analysed it for his definition of tragedy in the Poetics. It is the seminal Greek tragedy, setting the norm in a way that cannot be claimed for any other work, not even the Oresteia, at least as implied by Aristotle. Newman is right in observing that Greeks did not write by the principles stated by Aristotle later but in their own free style with poetry on one hand and character on the other. .in neither the Oedipus Colonus nor the Phitoctetes, the two most beautiful plays of Sophocles, is the plot striking; but how exquisite is the delineation of the characters of Antigone and Oedipus. .[In Agamemnon] the very simplicity of the fable constitutes its especial beauty. The death of Agamemnon is intimated at first -it is accomplished at last: throughout we find but the growing in volume and intensity of one and the same note - it is a working up of one musical ground, by figure and imitation, into the richness of combined harmony. But we look in vain for the progressive and thickening incidents of the Oedipus... The action of the Bacchae is also simple . it exhibits the grave irony of a god triumphing over the impotent presumption of man, the sport and terrible mischievousness of an insulted deity. Here then are two dramas of extreme poetical power, but deficient in skilfulness of plot. Aristotle, then, it must be allowed, treats dramatic composition more as an exhibition of ingenious workmanship, than as a free and unfettered 61 effusion of genius. The inferior poem may, on his principle, be the better tragedy. 3 This substantially proves that Aristotle’s remarks on tragedy need not be taken as the last words. In the same way his sacred principles on hamartia which leads to the suffering of the tragic protagonist and to the tragic catastrophe can also be seriously challenged; if not fully but fairly. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy excludes not only the Greek plays but the Shakespearean plays too. Rather than stating what Greek tragedy was, which was written long time before Aristotle sat down to write his Poetics, his comments are on what a tragedy of the highest order ought to be. This way we would do well to examine why they have turned out to be masterpieces of tragic art. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. The chorus of Greek tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist's intention. The chorus not only provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and emotion of the audience throughout the play: it tells us much of our own moral duty and speaks much of moral good and moral evil in general. For Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BC) it might be said that the chorus was the play. For even Sophocles (c. 496-406 BC) and for Euripides (c. 480-406 BC) it remained powerful in differing ways. The superhuman characters of these plays, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, are as if from a great operatic tableaux, built for weight and not speed, and are evidently intended to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of experience.

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