tragedy and the tragic

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Tragedy and the TragicAuthor(s): Robert J. NelsonSource: Arion, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1963), pp. 86-95Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162873 .

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TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

Robert J. Nelson

1 N HIS RECENT A DEFINITION OF TRAGEDY

(1961), Oscar Mandel begins his definition with the common sensible assertion that "naturally, it would be absurd to propose a definition thrusting out of the cannon a host of workers which

everyone has always taken for tragedies" (p. 6). Still, aware of "the haziness of the word, the casual way in which, because it is an honorific term, it has been employed," Mandel recognizes that the "definer will be compeUed in turn to select and reject." And

indeed, it is one of the virtues of Mandel's book to demonstrate the tenuous or nonexistent connection with the tragic of a great

many plays called tragedies by a great many people, if not "by everyone." Reviewing a great many plays, Mandel "tests" and finds vaUd the foUowing definition:

A work of art is tragic if it substantiates the foUowing situa tion: A protagonist who commands our earnest good will is

impelled in a given world by a purpose, or undertakes an

action, of a certain seriousness and magnitude; and by that very purpose or action, subject

to that same given world, necessarily and inevitably meets with grave spiritual or physical suffering.

As the kernel of his definition Mandel stresses the notion of

inevitability. Though the notion itself is not new in tragic theory, his stress on it in the history of that theory is, he beUeves, unique.

What seems to me even more useful to note in the Ught of that

history is Mandel's de-emphasis of what might be called the

response to the tragic situation both from within the universe of the play and from without it?that is, either by the actors or

spectators. Such responses Mandel finds to be part not of the

tragedy but of the "post-tragic episodes:"

. . . tragedy

is not necessarily coterminous with the work of art

as a whole. The post-tragic episodes have a place in this inquiry because they may carry us back to the tragedy itself, and make the final emotional or philosophical commentary on the action. It is here, rather than in the tragic action itself, that we may on occasion find an uplift, a reconciliation, or on the other side a final push into the abyss. Some authors may wish to re-estabUsh a certain serenity of mood, others to offer an intellectual prom ise after the downfall, still others to end in redoubled negation.

This is an exceUent distinction, yet, it seems to me, Mandel's

syntax threatens to obscure it. For, here and elsewhere, Mandel



Robert /. Nelson 87

seems to use the terms "tragedy" and "tragic" interchangeably, with "tragic" being the adjectival form of the esthetic category of "tragedy." That both terms are esthetic categories for Mandel is clear from the synonymy between "the tragedy" and "the action" in the passage. This identity between tragedy and tragic as esthetic categories is also supported by Mandel's earlier useful assertion that tragedy

is not an essence or a quaUty, but is rather

a "situation." However, in his understandable concentration on

works of art which depict this situation, Mandel perhaps leaves the impression in some minds that the "tragic situation" exists only in works of art. Mandel is properly skeptical of the changes in

response to various dramatic heroes and heroines: he cites the

critical rise and fall of certain Shakespearean and CorneUan heroes

?Shylock and Chim?ne are cases in point?and he might have mentioned Rousseau's celebrated appraisal of MoUere's Alceste

("Le pauvre Alceste!"). The critic thus considers it scientifically necessary to exclude from his definition emotional responses and moral assessments of "the tragic situation." Yet in doing so he is in danger of coming up with the "stable" definition that "a

work of art is tragic if it substantiates the assertion that Ufe is hard for everybody." To invoke a distinction made by Gustave Lanson in his Esquisse d'une histoire de la trag?die fran?aise

(1920), Mandel's stable definition is in danger of giving us a definition of the pathetic rather than of the tragic:

... le path?tique na?t de la souffrance et de la plainte; le

dramatique r?sulte du conflit, de l'incertitude, de l'attente anxieuse: le tragique

est la manifestation, dans un cas doulou

reux, des Umites de la condition humaine et de la force invisible

qui l'?treint. Il y a du path?tique sans tragique, du dramatique sans

tragique. Le tragique, toujours path?tique, n'est pas n?cessaire

ment dramatique, il l'est en proportion de l'incertitude et de la lutte qu'il contient.

There is, of course, another major distinction here: between the

tragic and the dramatic, between, that is, a moral category and

an esthetic one. Now this distinction may be found in the inter stices of Mandel's discussion as well, but because in his case and in Lanson's both the syntax and the emphases of the critics tend to obscure this useful distinction, I would Uke to make it more

expUcit and sharper than either of these critics do. Both critics are, of course, interested in artistic renditions of the

tragic, adducing a great many works of art which, to recall

Mandel, substantiate the tragic situation. In Lanson's case, this

esthetic bias leads, (it seems to me) to certain falsifications:

especially in the case of Corneille he stresses the dramatic, that is, the "incertitude" and "la lutte," to the neglect of the concept of "des limites de la condition humaine." The autonomy of the



88 TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

tragic, its specifically moral character, is thus obscured and Lan son is curiously in accord with the emphasis on suffering which I

find obscuring Mandel's discussion as well. In Mandel's case, the

distinction between the moral and the esthetic referends is better maintained (to be sure) but (1) because it is made less explicit or, more accurately, is not emphasized and (2) because Mandel

rigorously insists on excluding "value judgments" in his definition, the usefulness of both the impUcit and expUcit components of

Mandel's "stable definition" is not so great as it might be. Aware of the "essentiaUstic" connotation of substantives, I

would (hasten to) agree with Mandel that the tragic is a situa

tion, but I would add that it is also a relation: the tragic is that relation of values in which a higher value is sacrificed to a lesser value or in which a value is sacrificed to a non-value. This defini tion inevitably involves the "unstable" spectator reactions of which Mandel has been so properly skeptical in view of the history of

tragic theory. Yet, that it is impossible to exclude value as a cate

gory Mandel himself impUcitly recognizes in his inclusion of such

concepts as "our earnest good will," "an action, of a certain

seriousness and magnitude," "grave spiritual or physical suffering" (itaUcs mine). Furthermore, the definition I have proposed sug

gests only the morphology of situation?it points, I repeat, to a

relation between values. That one value is "up" in one epoch and "down" in another in no way detracts from the viabiUty (or universaUty, if you wish) of the definition or relation. The very basis of Mandel's distinction between the "tragedy" and the "post tragic episode" Ues in the integrity or, estheticaUy speaking, com

pleteness of the "tragic situation." And when Mandel excludes the

possibiUty of including what might be called redemptive episodes as

parts of the situation, more importantly, when among post

tragic interludes Mandel distinguishes between these redemptive episodes and those which give "a final push into the abyss,"?then it (seems to me) is clear that to the kernel of his definition he

must add not only necessity and inevitabiUty but irrevocability or, to maintain the religious terminology I have employed, ir

redemption. In moral terms, the tragic is irrevocable loss of value. Viewed

as a moral category, the tragic is thus more comprehensive than

the frequent interchange of the terms "the tragic" and "tragedy" allows. Like Paul Val?ry's poetic state, the tragic "state"?or to use terms common in theories of tragedy: the tragic outlook, the

tragic sense of Ufe, the tragic vision or view?is something which all men may know: peasant as well as king, poUtician as well as artist. It is the recognition that the values which man forges for himself are ultimately inadequate, it is the awareness of Ufe's Umitations. To borrow a

concept from modern physics, this aware

ness may be said to faU within a "tragic field," potentiaUy includ

ing the most trivial of our daily frustrations and definitely includ



Robert J. Nelson 89

ing the dreaded faU of kings. In this perspective, the relation of the "pathetic" to the tragic is problematic. The pathetic may be said to lie between two magnetic fields of force?the tragic and the comic?and depending on the strength of the respective fields, it is drawn to one rather than the other. Thus, that f amiUar example of the pathetic victim, the child killed in a traffic accident, may be said to be a manifestation of the force of the "tragic field": the child?or his parents who are the co-victims, the "witnesses,"

of the event?learns at the fringes of the field what the "tragic hero" learns at the heart of the field where he appUes man's values in their fullest validity: the irrevocable loss of value. As for the inevitabiUty of the "pathetic event," a consistently tragic view

would note the fact of the child's death?which might be called an instance of biological determinism. Moreover, with a sufficient

adjustment of focus, the particular instance might be shown to have been part of an irrevocable chain of events, a manifestation

of psychic or reUgious determinism. The pessimism of a Freud or of a Pascal easily matches the pessimism of a Euripides or a Seneca. On the other hand, the "pathetic event" might be shown to have been unnecessary, that is, be drawn into the "comic field":

greater knowledge of themselves and of their offspring, safer

driving conditions, etc., could be adduced as being capable of

preventing the event. As for the irrevocabiUty of the child's death, a consistently comic view would regard this as a fact of life.

As an esthetic category, tragedy is the artistic embodiment of the experience of the tragic?or has been in certain plays of

Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, Racine. For many plays which have been designated "tragedy" by critics (and dramatists?Corneille is an

example) transcend or skirt the tragic as such, the notion that man is a creature of limited resources in a

universe which is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to his fondest aspirations. This discrepancy between the tragic and

tragedy goes back to the much-mooted question of the origins of

tragedy. To the death of the god-king figure which Ues at the root of the form, two distinct developments took place: in the one, the figure simply suffered defeat and death; in the other, the

figure suffered defeat and death, but regeneration as well. The former development is that depicted by Sir William Ridgeway in the "Origin of Tragedy," (1910) as a ritual lamentation over the dead "hero;" its emotional impUcations are pessimistic. The latter

development, emphasizing the Dionysiacal element, is a cathartic and regenerative celebration pointing to the cyclical renewal of nature; its emotional impUcations are optimistic. It goes beyond the tragic.

The latter interpretation has been a persistent one. From Aristotle's concept of catharsis through Hegel's annulment of the unmediated contradiction and on to Pirandello's concept of eternal form, theoreticians and practitioners have, in Reinhold Niebuhr's




phrase, gone "beyond tragedy" to some

notion?reUgious, psy

chological, ethical?in which the fact of limitation is, in the end, either expUcitly denied or, what comes to the same thing, sub sumed into a higher order of understanding in which the defeat of the "tragic hero" is paradoxically vindicated. These artists and critics recoil from the unremitting sense of defeat, the profound pessimism which is the first "lesson" of the tragic experience.

Sophocles's Oedipus the King and the criticism of it is a case in

point. In the terms of a recent theoretician of tragedy, Oedipus's story, Uke Job's, is one which states the problem of tragedy in its extreme form: "is there justice in a world where, for no reason

clear to the ethical understanding, the worst happens to the best?" Confronted with the demonstration that the "worst does happen to the best," few critics have been content to accept as the final

meaning of the play the image of the helpless, self-exiled king who pleads with his successor to restore his children to him. Some

retroactively apply the meanings of Oedipus at Colonus to the first

play, seeing in the faUen king's "acceptance" the first signs of the

transcendental, charismatic figure of the later play. Others, con tent to remain with the evidence of the first play, do in fact

justify Oedipus's fate. Aristotle's concept of the "tragic flaw" puts the blame on Oedipus?or at least this is the way it has at times been read, although precisely what the flaw is (o'enveening pride? anger?) or to what extent Oedipus can be said to be re

sponsible for it are more controversial than "orthodox" com

mentary might lead one to expect. Other critics have been less concerned to assess blame, content to accept Aristotle's view of

Oedipus as somehow flawed, but to go beyond this acceptance to an interpretation which vindicates Sophocles if not his hero. Thus, in Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (1939), H. D. F. Kitto views

Oedipus as one who upsets the moral balance of the universe, one

whose "punishment" may be viewed as excessive with relation to his crime but one who nevertheless is punished according to the

pattern of natural laws, a pattern which "may harshly cut across the life of the individual, but at least we know that it exists, and

we may feel assured that piety and purity are a large part of it." The catharsis is ours if not Oedipus's and, in fact, with its cosmic

focus, Kitto's interpretation robs Oedipus of his heroism (he is

"imprudent," says Kitto). But it robs all men of their heroism?

except, of course, the artist who reaUzes the logos which under lies man's fate. Kitto sees

Sophocles as noncommittal: "whether

or not it [the pattern] is beneficent, Sophocles does not say." Again, a Pirandello may have felt more keenly than most the

pain of inevitably "perishing value:" "conflict between Ufe-in movement and form is the inexorable condition not only of the mental but also of the physical order. The Ufe which in order to exist has become fixed in our corporeal form Uttle by Uttle kiUs that form. The tears of a nature thus fixed lament the irreparable,



Robert J.Nelson 91

continuous aging of our bodies." But the modem ItaUan dramatist

goes on to assert: "All that lives, by the fact of living, has a form, and by the same token must die?except the work of art which lives forever in so far as it is form." (Both passages from Eric

Bentley 's translation of the "Preface" to Six Characters in Naked

Masks, 1952). Tragedy?art?transcends the tragic: the illumina tion is the artist's?and ours?as he creates and we

enjoy that work

in which our humanity finds its noblest, most complete expression: the work of art. The artist, not the tragic victim, is the true "tragic

hero." The more prevalent

strain of regenerative tragic theory

puts the hero in his "proper" place: hero. Both before and after the catastrophe the victim is heroic. An analogue of such a theory is found in reUgious interpretation of the Oedipus The King in

light of Oedipus at Colonus in which the victim becomes saint. But where for the reUgious transcendentalist the illumination or

acceptance is the key event of the play, for the heroic transcen

dentaUst, the seff-blinding is the key event: "It was ApoUo, friends, Apollo,/ that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to

completion./ But the hand that struck me/ was none but my own"

(11. 1329-1333 in David Grene's translation, The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. II: Sophocles, University of Chicago, 1959). Punishment is not the Lord's, but man's; man is his own

judge and, as such, is free. Thus, in his Tragedy (1957), WilUam G. McCollom rejects Loewenberg's analysis of the tragic situation in which "the illusion of free voUtion on the part of the agent and the recognition of it as illusion by the spectator are comple

mentary aspects of tragedy viewed as a work of art." For McCol lom "the tragic character must be seen as a

dynamic force, a being

whose self is always more than the sum total of what has hap

pened to it" and McCollom goes on to reject the "tragic irony" pointed to by Loewenberg because it would allow of no other

"enUghtenment" than the "reaUzation that the hero never had a chance." And for Robert Brustein the profound pessimism which he finds in tragedy is ultimately less significant than the

"unflinching acceptance of the human condition" (my itaUcs). Indeed, for Brustein, Greek tragedy "is the noblest act of re sistance in Uterature." ("The Memory of Heroism," Tulane Drama

Review, March 1960.) For such theorists the catharsis produced by tragedy results

from an interaction not of pity and terror but of these emotions and courage. They see in tragedy an ultimate rejection of the thesis stated by the Choms in Anouilh's Antigone: ". . . c'est

reposant, la trag?die, parce qu'on sait qu'il n'y a plus d'espoir, le sale espoir; qu'on

est pris, qu'on est enfin pris

comme un rat, avec

tout le ciel sur son dos, et qu'on n'a plus qu'a crier,?pas ? g?mir,

non, pas ? se plaindre,?? gueuler ? pleine voix ce qu'on avait ?

dire, qu'on n'avait jamais dit et

qu'on ne savait peut-?tre m?me

pas encore. Et pour rien: pour se le dire ? soi, pour l'apprendre,




soi." (Nouvelles Pi?ces noires, Paris, La Table Ronde, 1958, p. 161. ) To be sure, transcendental theorists also view the end result of tragedy as "reposant" but the repose is not the derisive state

pointed to by Anouilh's nihi?stic conclusions. It is one, rather, which vindicates the tragic catastrophe. As Brustein puts it:

"Through the attempt to fulfill these impossible hopes, the tragic hero develops a vision deeper than that of his choral com

mentators?deeper and more piercing because it has been reached

through frenzy and suffering. Daring to transcend philosophy, daring to outface necessity, the hero stretches the outer boundaries of his Umitations to their utmost, and, in the consequent rending and tearing, estabUshes new boundaries towards which men may strive."

The overtones of such transcendental theories are, as we would

nowadays put it, existentiaUst. Man is constantly confronted with

painful, unavoidable choices and no choice is definitive in the

never-ending dialectic whereby one choice only gives way to another. Yet, tragedy?the artistic embodiment of the experience of the tragic?may be described as the uncompromising expos? of the illusion that "where there is Ufe, there is hope." The cultiva tion of this iUusion by various characters may be said to provide the dynamism of which McCollom speaks, but in certain tragedies (that is in specific works), this dynamism is brought to rest as the iUusion is destroyed, as the hero is c&s-illusioned, as he is brought to despair. Existentialists also fulminate against "le sale espoir," but they do so against hope as a psychological datum understood as a sop, whereas their very dialectic (McCoUom's dynamism) forces them to

regard it as a metaphysical datum synonymous with

possibiUty. According to a "tragedy" of engagement, action? whether of deed or thought?is reaUty, the means to self-fulfill

ment; action, according to the tragic view and certain specific

tragedies, is illusory, the path to self-negation. One cannot deny that many plays denominated as tragedies

and regarded as such among reasonable men justify the regenera tive interpretation ("justify" on esthetic grounds?I am not con cerned here to question such interpretations on moral grounds). There may be dispute about the validity of such theories concern

ing Oedipus the King: the play may be said to be one thing, the lessons we derive from it another?or several others. But of Ham

let, for example, there can be no doubt: "Not a whit," Hamlet tells Horatio when the latter would postpone the fencing bout, "we

defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man

knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be"

(V. ii). And, as Hamlet dies: "Now cracks a noble heart. Good

night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest"

(V.ii). The resolution is reUgious, the transcendence is the hero's



Robert J. Nelson 93

and not merely the spectator's. But the transcendence takes place within the play, which is to say that the tragedy ceases to be

tragic. There is, as in Kitto's interpretation of Oedipus the King, an order to

things; the universe is indeed a traverse and not a

chaos. Moreover, what was merely

a matter of conjecture in

Kitto's Oedipus the King (according to Kitto) is a reaUty in Hamlet: the order is not in man's hands, but the hands which do hold it are beneficent. The order is divine, and being specifically Christian, Hamlet is not a tragedy, but a part of a Divine Comedy, the fulfillment of a possibiUty, not the end of one.

That is, the outcome of the "Tragedy of Hamlet" is not tragic, but its opposite. By habit of thought we think of the "opposite" of

tragedy as comedy?or, in view of the basic distinction of this

paper, the opposite of the "tragic" as the "comic." Until recently? certainly as recently as the "new" theater of Beckett and others

with their "dark comedy"?but perhaps as long ago as those Romantics who found in Moli?re the expression of their own rire amer?until such manifestations, I repeat, the concept of the comic as the opposite of the tragic would not be surprising. To be sure, the prestige of the genre of tragedy has traditionally rele

gated comedy to second place: the concerns of comedy were the concerns of less serious if indeed un-serious people, that is to say, the lower classes. And it is curious to note that even so

great a

critic as Erich Auerbach impUcitly shares this bias: the history of the representation of reaUty in Western Uterature (the subtitle of his Mimesis) may be defined as the progressive assimilation of

formerly "comic" types into the "tragic field." Indeed, it is pre cisely this assimilation?whether progressive and necessary or

merely fortuitous and random?which leads Mandel to exclude

matters of value from his definition. Yet, setting aside such socially derived definitions of both tragedy and comedy and regarding the comic, as we did the tragic, as a relation or the morphology of situations, it is indeed possible to think of Hamlet as "comic." For the comic is that relation in which higher value triumphs over lesser value or in which value triumphs

over non-value.

Traditionally, this relation has been expressed through the satirical depiction of human foibles in which the laughter is dissociated from the butt of the comedy. This is how we have

thought of the comic because this is what most comedies have "been about." Nevertheless, the recent emergence of the "new"

dramatists, of the "dark comedy" and of the "sick comedians" is an indication that, like pathos in relation to the tragic and the

comic, satire and ridicule may be drawn into either "field of force." To the extent that the foibles are considered ineradicable, satire and ridicule may be viewed as species of tragedy and their artistic projections as tragedies. But satire and ridicule may presuppose that the foibles they point to are not ineradicable limitations (foible?faible?weak) in man, but aberrations. Thus,




to the extent that they are ameliorative and corrective in purpose,

satire and ridicule are negative expressions of a confidence in

human nature, an affirmation of life's possibiUties. It is not without

significance that in spite of the fame of its "satirical" first part, Dante's great poem is called a Comedy, for it celebrates man's

triumph over the inescapable tragic fact of death; The Divine

Comedy celebrates everlasting Ufe. In CathoUc eschatology, as that modem tragic viewer Unamuno has recognized,

one over

comes the "tragic sense of Ufe." Comedy is the generic word for forms of drama in the Middle ages not because of a lack of "tragic genius," but because the dominant outlook is anti-tragic. To recall

Niebuhr, Christianity is "beyond tragedy." Within Hamlet, then, as within many other "tragedies," the transcendence of the tragic is "one of the laws of the universe of the play," a concept I borrow from Lucien Goldmann's brilUant Jean Racine: dramaturge (Paris, 1956), Hamlet is resolved, so to speak, not by a Deus ex machina, but by a Deus in machina. It moves through the tragic, projecting both the fact of human limitation and a positive response to it.

However, other playwrights show a greater

consonance be

tween their form and the tragic: the tragic and the tragedy are, to use Mandel's terms, "coterminous." Euripides, Seneca, the Shake

speare of King Lear, the Pirandello of Six Characters (of which Pirandello is, of course, only another critic in the comments given above). Within the play the "hero" suffers, for no reason clear to his ethical understanding, the worst of fates. Such playwrights

are

not necessarily morally or

esthetically superior for this consonance

between tragedy and the tragic. In the Poetics (ch. 13) Aristotle

may have simply been describing or he may have been evaluating Euripides in calUng him the "most tragic of all poets" precisely because he brought illustrious men to an

unhappy end. Seneca

has undoubtedly been as much maUgned for the unremitting horror of his unhappy endings as he has for his outlandish rhetoric and his bookish construction. But the moral assessment of partic ular playwrights or works is more a matter of the judge's personal psychic and cultural orientation than one of objective criticism. Confronted with a particular "tragedy," the objective critic is concerned not with judgment but with a description of the rela tion between the tragic and the response to it within the work.

One of the chief concerns of the critic must surely be the timing of such response?or responses?by the people (the characters) of the work's universe. The timing of illumination of the tragic hero is of the greatest dramatic consequence, for, once he has been

illuminated, being a man of intelUgence and reasonable virtue, he will make the only appropriate response to the tragic: acceptance.

(I repeat: if we speak of his acceptance

as a means of transcend

ing his Umitation, it is we?not he?who move "beyond tragedy"). With almost all theoreticians of tragedy I stress the importance of

the "hero's" virtue and intelligence. His intelUgence must be great



Robert J. Nelson 95

enough for him to perceive his limitation; his virtue must be great enough for him to act honorably and realistically on the reality he has perceived: only a fool would deny the tragic; only a knave would attempt to profit from his perception at the expense of less illuminated fellows. In this light one can also perceive a possible explanation for Aristotle's selection as model of a man without

extreme virtue or intelligence. With extreme or even absolute

perfection in such attributes the hero would sense so soon the fact

of the tragic?that is, the fact of his and all men's limitation?that he could not act (or, in light of his integrity, would not act, knowing how futile such action would be). A man of such initially great insight and integrity, who might be described as pre-tragic,

would not be dramatically interesting. This fact has not prevented many dramatists from creating such figures: French Renaissance

tragedy is replete with them. Where protagonist as well as spec

tator enjoy foreknowledge there is no irony, no thrill of appre hension. True, the distinct emotional cUmate of tragedy

is appre

hension, but it depends precisely on the spectator's knowing what the "tragic" character does not know. More complicated

are those

cases of pre-tragic figures who are rendered actively tragic?that is, characters whose dramatic trajectory is a

moving in and out of

tragic awareness. Racine is the master creator of such

figures: how

skillfully he leads Oreste, Hermione, Pyrrhus, Hippolyte, Ph?dre and so many others to cultivate, against their own best judgment, the illusion of hope; how masterfully he creates situations in

which they may expect fulfillment of their desires?only to return them to their own first awareness of limitation and frustration.

Indeed, it is well to end with Racine with his supreme insight into the problems of rendering the tragic into art. Both in his theo

retical writings (especially his little-known marginal commen

taries on Aristotle) and in his plays we learn that to write a successful tragedy it is not

enough to be aware of the tragic.

One must also be aware of dramatic art.



tragedy and the tragic

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