THE BOOK WAS DRENCHED - OUDL Home

xxviii General Introduction
it is represented by the gods or the vaguer personifications of supernatural
powers. Elsewhere, it may be the Christian God or Fate or Destiny.
Call it any name one will, tragedy always presents man as living under
something divine or superhuman which partially determines his actions.
It may be argued then that these are the three basic assumptions of
tragedy: first, the dignity of man, second, the freedom of his will and
his responsibility for the use which he makes of that will, and third, the
existence in the universe of a superhuman factor. It may be further
suggested that, having made these assumptions, tragedy is fundamentally
oriented towards the problem of evil, either explicitly or implicitly. It
faces squarely the fact of evil in the world, that there is misery in man's
life, which is a life to be ended by the mystery of death. Sometimes
tragedy grapples directly with the problem as is the case in Aeschylus'
Prometheus Bound and Oresteia. Perhaps it is because of their direct
attack upon the essence of evil that these plays achieve a scale and universality
never reached in Shakespeare. Sometimes the orientation is
more implicit, as it is in Euripides' Hippolytus, for example, or in Hamlet,
or Othello, or Oedipus the King, or The Bacchae. The action of all these
plays illustrates the working of one aspect of evil or another, and provides
in a sense material out of which one can construct some terms
upon which the fact of evil can be faced. Therefore, rather than maintain
with Aristotle and Bradley that tragedy occurs only in connection with
a tragic hero and his "tragic flaw," it seems better to insist upon a wider
scope, a genus which will include the Aristotelian type as one of its
most important species, namely, that tragedy makes the three assumptions
with respect to man's life, and then places him over against the
everlasting and eternally mysterious question of evil. Then and only
then does tragedy arise, but it is important to note that this does not
mean utter defeat for man, since the first assumption is that man's life
is meaningful. That there is not utter defeat in true tragedy seems to
be at the very core of Horatio's last lines of farewell to Hamlet:
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
And may it not be that there are those who seek to interpret life, make
the three assumptions of the tragic, face the problem of evil, and call
life a tragedy, but never defeat?
Of the many writers of Greek tragedy only Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides are represented in the collection of plays which have survived,
and even this collection includes but a small fraction of .the total number
of dramas which these men wrote. Aeschylus, the earliest of the three,