Form

Freytag’s Pyramid

Exposition - establish story, character, setting

Inciting incident - suspense (Polonius’s Death)

Rising action - events start and tension

Complication - something goes wrong

Climax - peak of conflict and peripeteia

Reversal - protagonist fortune change

Falling action - evolves and becomes clear, less tension

Resolution - problem resolved

Denouement = unknotting

Revenge tragedies

Catharsis - releasing and thereby providing relief from strong repressed emotions

Hubris - excessive pride

Hermatia - fatal flaw or error of judgement

Mimesis - drama imitates life

Peripeteia - reversal in fortune brought about by the hero’s error in judgment

Anagnorisis - discovery that reversal was bought about by hero’s own actions

Closet drama - plays to be read rather than performed

Audience listening not watching

Revenge tragedy conventions

• Avenging hero is killed

• Spectacle for the sake of spectacle (dramatic violence)

• Villains/accomplices are killed

• Supernatural forces urging protagonist to seek vengeance

• Play within a play

• Madness or feigned madness

• Disguise

• Violent murders

• Soliloquies

• Machiavellian figure (selfish/sly)

• Fifth and final act where many die

• Degeneration of a once noble protagonist

Ancient Greek Tragedy

• 500 - 200 BC

• Hermatia and catharsis

• Heroes and death

Aeschylus - c.524-455 BC, father of Greek tragedy

Sophocles - c.497-406 BC, philosopher

Euripides - c.480-406 BC, greatest influence of western tradition of drama

Aristotle - Hermatia, huberis, philosopher

AC Bradley - wrote a book about Shakespeare’s tragedies

Shakespeare tragedy features according to AC Bradley:

• One central ‘hero’ character

• Structurally leads to death

• Hero cannot be alive at end

• Medieval tragedy —> riches to rags

• Person of a high degree

• Calamities proceed mainly from actions of men

• Interconnected deeds leads to catastrophe

• Hero contributes in some measure to disaster

• Idea of conflicting “spiritual force” e.g. loyalty and revenge at work driving a man’s soul

• Importance of actions or deeds typical to certain type of character - calamities and catastrophe follow inevitability from the deeds of men Interconnected. Exceptions are madness, supernatural and accident

Hegel

Theory of conflict in tragedy

Hamlet vs King

Roman Tragedy

Educated men likely to have a better grasp on Latin than Greek. Schoolboys acted in ancient Roman comedies

Seneca

• 5 acts

• Physical violence

• Competing desire and passion

• Highly-wrough, complex, ambitious language