The Tragic Curve: A Review of two Productions of Macbeth

Summary

What is Tragedy? The two-thousand-three-hundred-year-old question, as evasive of answer as Pilate's, has recently been raised again. The latest to attempt the riddle, Peter Alexander in his Northcliffe lectures, defines it (after Aristotle) as that which produces a certain special response in an audience; and he declares that what conditions the response is the nature of the chief character presented. Tragedy, then, is a demonstration of the virtue the Greeks called Arete, nobility of spirit triumphing over disaster and death. The argument is witty and exciting, and succeeds in determining more precisely the species of pleasure that Tragedy brings. But the tragic hero's cap, as cut by Alexander, fits his chosen mannequin Hamlet with difficulty, and only after some bodging of the prayer-scene. There is still much to explain.

I suggest that the one essential thing about a tragedy is its shape. It is a progress, a development, a course. The man who runs it (both the character and the actor who presents that character) must, it is true, be of such a nature that the audience is under compulsion not merely to follow his fortunes intently but to become emotionally engaged. The nature of the tragic hero, however, admits of much wider variation than does the nature of the tragic progress, which can be plotted with much the same mathematical accuracy as the fall of a wave or the flight of a shell. Of course there are waves of different wave-length and shells of varying trajectory, but each follows the same general pattern. Upon the plotting of the tragic curve, first by the playwright and then by producer and actors, depends the entire success of the play in the theatre.