Tragedy

like comedy, had its origin in the festivals held among the ancient Greeks in honor of Bacchus or Dionysus. Comedy took its rise from the jovial songs sung by the comus or procession. Tragedy grew out of the dithyramb, a choral song sung about the altar of Bacchus to celebrate his birth, and, perhaps, his adventures. Arion gave this song a definite shape by writing regular poems and arranging music suited to them. They were called tragedies, that is, tragic songs or goat-songs, probably because the singers wore goatskins to represent satyrs. Another explanation of the name is that a goat was offered on the altar to Bacchus as an appropriate sacrifice to the god of wine since the goat is a destroyer of vines.

The next step in the development of Greek tragedy was taken by the rhapsodes. These were wandering minstrels who recited poetry with or without musical accompaniment. The different ballads which go to make up the Iliad and the Odyssey were spread abroad by the rhapsodes. Thespis is given the credit for introducing a representative of these rhapsodes into the chorus or "tragedies" sung at the Dionysian festival, about 535 B. C. The rhapsode addressed his recitations to the leader of the chorus, thus carrying on a sort of dialogue. The chorus stood around the leader on the steps of the Bacchic altar, while the "actor," a rhapsode, stood on a table. This is the real beginning of dramatic tragedy. For the further development of tragedy the reader is referred to the article on DRAMA.

The first English tragedy was Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex by Thomas Sackville. This production was after the form of classical tragedy. It lacks in spirit, feeling, and imagination, but is of interest as the first English tragedy. Welsh says:

Thenceforward the drama makes rapid proggress, passing from youth to a splendid maturity with enormous strides, and extending in a single generation over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy, with that breadth of anticipation and intoxication of heart which the ardent soul may experience, when from being a child it has become a man and feels a new-glowing joy shoot through nerve and vein. Expanding with the growing taste, it quits the Palace, the Inns, the Universities, where it is compressed, and creates in 1576 a public theater and a national audience. Before the end of the century, eleven theaters and nearly two hundred dramas attest the absorbing passion.

Tragedy is the highest form of the poetic art. A list of the world's great tragedies is not long. Many critics regard Sophocles as the greatest of tragedians and place the Oedipus Tyrannus at the "very summit of Greek tragic art." Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, Goethe's Faust, and four plays of Shakespeare, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, may be considered great tragedies.

See Drama; Comedy; Act; Stage; Arion; Siddons; Kean; Barrett; Booth; Irving; Sophocles; Shakespeare; etc.

Tragedy is poetry in its deepest earnest. Comedy is poetry in unlimited jest.--Coleridge.