Tragedy
Athens to Afghanistan
This document is the beginning of an exploratory reading list for some part – not all – of your
preparation for the Tragedy paper in Part 2 English. It can be used in a number of different
ways, and – in its developing forms and monstrous limbs, which I will distribute at various
points over the next year – is something you should keep by you, and keep using, as you begin,
continue, and finish studying for the paper and for the examination. It shares much ground with,
but is not identical to, the Faculty's reading list for this paper, which you should also consult. In
the first instance, you will want to use this list as a guide to help you get started over the summer,
with your preliminary excavations into Greek and Latin tragedy, your review of the tragedy of
Shakespeare and his near contemporaries, and your first steps toward the great tragic writers (and
artists, and composers) of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In some eventual
and complete form, this reading list should also make suggestions about other ways of thinking
about tragedy and about the tragedy paper – from readings in the Bible, to ancient and modern
philosophers and theorists of tragedy, epistemology, language and so on, to the work of critics,
and to journalism and other writing about 'real', contemporary 'tragedies'. You will increasingly
find that this reading list does not cover texts and topics that are of interest to you in your work,
or that you wish were of interest to you; it is natural that you should outstrip such a guide, and I
ask only that you keep me informed about where you find the reading list deficient.
Greek tragedies
The greater mass of tragedies written for the audiences of Athens have been lost to us; I blame
Caesar and Aurelian.1 There are two complete editions of the extant Greek tragedies that you
may like to consult, or read from:
[1] The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 4 vols
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
[2] Volumes in the Loeb series, published by Harvard University Press. The advantage of
the Loeb volumes is that you get facing-page translations of the Greek originals, so that
you can pick out the original words if you like.
Modern translations/editions of individual plays, or selections of plays, are more common, and
you can find many of them in paperback. You should look out particularly for:
Aeschylus, Oresteia, transl. Christopher Collard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, transl. John Davie (London: Penguin, 2006).
Euripides, Hecuba, transl. Christopher Collard (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1991).
Euripides, Heracles and Other Plays, transl. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003).
1 On Caesar's destruction of part of the great library at Alexandria, see Plutarch, The Life of Julius Caesar (in The Lives
of the Noble Grecians and Romans), sec. 49, and Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 7.17.
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Euripides, The Trojan Women and Other plays, transl. James Morwood (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, transl. H. D. F. Kitto (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
These volumes (and others like them) make good reading copies, and generally come with
helpful notes and introductions, but you should be wary of allowing your scholarly instincts to
rest satisfied with their texts and interpretations. Go on; out-herod Herod.
The Faculty's reading list for this paper alerts you to a number of 'literary' translations of these
tragedies; these recommendations are worthy of rehearsal here. Such 'translations', 'versions', and
'imitations' should be treated as literary works in their own rights, and you should be thinking
carefully, when reading them, about the kinds of choices, but also the kinds of changes, that
these poets have made upon and to their originals (i.e. you will need to have read the originals
first!). See in particular:
Robert Browning, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (London: Smith Elder, 1877). See also The
Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Roma A. King et al. (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1969 –)
Tony Harrison, Aeschylus' Oresteia (London: Collings, 1982).
Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (Derry: Field Day, 1990; repr. London: Faber and Faber,
1991); and The Burial at Thebes (London: Faber, 2004).
Ted Hughes, Euripides' Alcestis (London: Faber, 1999); and Aeschylus' Oresteia (London:
Faber, 1999).
Brendan Kennelly, Euripides' Medea (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991);
Euripides' The Trojan Women (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1993); and Sophocles'
Antigone (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996).
Louis MacNeice, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (London: Faber and Faber, 1936; repr. 1967).
Derek Mahon, The Bacchae: After Euripides (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Books, 1991).
Ezra Pound, Sophocles' Women of Trachis (London: N. Spearman, 1956; repr. Faber, 1969);
and, with Rudd Fleming, Elektra (London: Faber, 1990).
Wole Soyinka, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973).
I cannot recommend highly enough the venerable but enduring scholarship of R. C. Jebb (who
used to live across the street from Queens'), whose editions of and commentaries on Sophocles,
first published by Cambridge University Press at the end of the nineteenth century, are now
newly available in paperback editions, edited by P. E. Easterling, from the Bristol Classical Press.
You can also find Jebb's editions on Perseus, the free online resource for Classical texts and
translations, whither you should make resort daily and industriously, please (bookmark it:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus:collection:Greco-Roman);
Perseus also includes many of the Loeb texts, and like the Loeb editions allows you to load
English translations against Latin and Greek originals. You should certainly have a look
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sometime at A. E. Housman's Fragment of a Greek Tragedy. You should also consider reading some
of Aristophanes' comedies, and in particular the Thesmophoriazusae, which features Euripides, and
Frogs, which includes a famous slanging match between Aeschylus and Euripides.
Latin tragedies
The major writer here is Lucius Annaeus Seneca, of stoical fame. Seneca (or someone like
Seneca) composed ten tragedies in Latin, probably never destined for the stage: Hercules; Trojan
Women; Phoenician Women; Medea; Phaedra; Oedipus; Agamemnon; Thyestes; Hercules on Oeta; Octavia;
There are three good ways in which to take your Seneca:
[1] In the Loeb edition: Seneca, Tragedies, transl. John G. Fitch, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2002-2004). You may also find the earlier Loeb translations, by
Frank Justus Miller, which are also in two volumes, and were originally published in 1917.
[2] Seneca, Four Tragedies With Octavia, transl. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1966, 1974).
Notice how this only gets you halfway.
[3] Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, Translated into Englysh (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581). Some of
these translations (e.g. that of Thyestes) were made by Donne's uncle, Jasper Heywood
(before he fled persecution in England on account of his recusancy). These translations
were read and much thought on by the sharked-up resolutes of Shakespeare's generation.
Stomach them on EEBO, in black-letter – or, if you must, find Troas, Agamemnon, and
Thyestes, dressed in modern spelling, in Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies, ed. James Ker and
Jessica Winston (MHRA, 2012).
Shakespeare
Your preparation for the Shakespeare element of the Tragedy paper will borrow from and build
on your work for Part I, but it will also amplify and outstrip it. Do not begin to entertain
considering the thought that you will simply write about Shakespeare, in the same way, and with
the same thoughts, next year as last year. Instead, let yourself loose on classical, contemporary,
and more modern forms of tragedy, and then come back to Shakespeare to see how your
perspective has – as it will have – changed. In particular, you might like to consider
Shakespeare's Roman works against the plays of Seneca; or you might like to worry about the
relation of Shakespeare's late tragedies to the epistemological preoccupations evident in
Euripides' plays. You will find other links and prisms through which to refresh and renew your
thinking about Shakespeare; be sure that you do.
You are by now current with editions of Shakespeare's works. If you have not yet invested in
individual texts of your preferred key tragedies – King Lear, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, etc. –
now might be a good time to do so. Upon your return after the summer, you will also want to
discover more about the sources and texts of those Shakespeare plays that seem as if they might
play an important part in your studies: return to Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare, and read where you like and may in Plutarch, Holinshed, Belleforest, Montaigne, and
others. For texts, don't forget the excellent William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, ed. Stanley
Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
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It is not an unmitigatedly bad, or mad, idea to consider working, and writing, on Shakespearean
plays that are not tragedies. There are tragic insights, and various kinds of tragic modality, in
plays from Much Ado About Nothing to Love's Labour's Lost. This route comes with a health
warning, though: these plays are not tragedies, and so should probably take the seats of helpful
passengers, but neither navigators nor drivers, on the great road trip of the paper. You may also
want to do work on Shakespeare's poetry – The Rape of Lucrece, above all – and this is a fine and
reputable ambition; but be sure, when you consider this poetry (as all poetry in this paper), that
you think carefully about how best to assimilate tragic poems into your thinking about theatrical
tragedies, and about where the distinctions between the two forms become unbrookable.
Contemporaries of Shakespeare
Accessible paperback editions of Renaissance English tragedies can be had at ridiculous prices
almost anywhere you look – New Mermaids, Methuen, Oxford University Press, Manchester
Univeresity Press, and others have glutted us wth reading copies. The Faculty's reading list has a
very full list, if you are interested in this period and its concerns; but as a starter, look particularly
for titles like these:
George Chapman: The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois in, e.g. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Four
Revenge Tragedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); this volume also includes The
Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, and The Atheist's Tragedy.
John Ford: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and The Broken Heart – in .e.g., 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and
Other Plays, ed. Manon Lomax (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus; Tamburlaine; Dido, Queen of Carthage; The Jew of Malta;
Edward II – all in, e.g., Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric
Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
John Marston: The Malcontent and Antonio's Revenge – in, e.g., The Malcontent and Other Plays
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Thomas Middleton (and others): The Changeling, Women Beware Women in, e.g. Women Beware
Women and Other Plays, ed. Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). [See above for
The Revenger's Tragedy]
John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi; The White Devil in, e.g. The Duchess of Malfi and Other
Plays, ed. Rene Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Also check out Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies (Marston, The Insatiate Countess; Beaumont and Fletcher,
The Maid's Tragedy; Middleton, The Maiden's Tragedy; and Fletcher, The Tragedy of Valentinian), ed.
Martin Wiggins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Other dramatists and poets
Once you have pushed your way through the bulk of the core dramatic reading for this paper,
you will have the chance to investigate tragedies in other languages, and other kinds of texts –
and art forms – that owe something to, or give something to, your study of tragedies in their
theatrical context. As I have said, you should not forget Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece; but you
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might also want to think about the ways in which historical sources for poems like this,
themselves, anticipate or borrow from the tragic narratives that one might, in a more 'literary'
context, be drawn from them. Or again, those of you who have studied French may like to learn
more about, and read more of, Racine. From year to year there are a number of texts in this
category that continue to feature in interesting ways in students' scripts, and these are some of
them:
Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works
(London: Penguin, 2006).
John Milton, Paradise Lost and Samson Agaonistes.
Jean Racine, Britannicus; Phèdre; Andromaque.
Pierre Corneille, Médée, Le Cid
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred, Cain
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt; A Doll's House; The Wild Duck; Ghosts; Hedda Gabler; The Master
Builder, in e.g. Four Major Plays, transl. James McFarlane and Jens Arup (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
August Strindberg, The Father, in e.g. Five Plays, transl. Harry G. Carlson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983); or Miss Julie and Other Plays, transl. Michael Robinson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Anton Chekhov, The Seagull; Uncle Vanya; The Cherry Orchard; Three Sisters; in e.g. Five Plays,
transl. Ronald Hingley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
John Millington Synge, Riders to the Sea, in e.g. The Playboy of the Western World and Other
Plays, transl. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
William Butler Yeats, Purgatory; The Death of Cuchulain; At the Hawk's Well
Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding; Yerma; The House of Bernarda Alba
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children; The Life of Galileo
Samuel Beckett, End Game; Happy Days; Rockaby; Waiting for Godot
Arthur Miller, All My Sons; The Crucible; Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge
Edward Bond, Saved; Lear
Wole Soyinka, The Road; Death and the King's Horseman
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden
Sarah Kane, Blasted; Cleansed; Crave; 4.48 Psychosis [Complete Plays]
In addition to these standard texts, I will continue to fill out the range of possibilities, and advise
you on directions that your reading might take – make sure you keep in touch, even over the
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summer if that suits you, about the kinds of texts that you like, and the kinds of ideas that you
would like to pursue. I would also strenuously encourage you to read the following:
The Book of Job
The Second Book of Samuel
The Gospel according to Matthew, cc 26 and 27
Philosophy and Theory
You would be wise to begin to familiarise yourself – or read widely in, depending upon your
interest and ambitions – the following key philosophical texts:
Aristotle, Poetics, transl. Stephen Haliwell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995). See also Amélie Rorty's book, below.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, transl. John Osborne (London: Verso,
2003).
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, transl. T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975).
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, transl. and ed. Hong and Hong (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983); 'The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in
Modern Drama', in Either/Or, transl. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987), I, pp. 137-64.
Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, transl. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, transl. Ronald Speirs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Beyond Good and Evil; The Advantages and
Disadvantages of History for Life.
Friedrich Schiller, 'On the Sublime', 'On the Tragic Art', and 'Of the Cause of the Pleasure
We Derive From Tragic Objects'.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols (New
York: Dover, 1969).
Introductory guides, criticism, etc.
One of the things you emphatically must do, and soon, is to acquire some knowledge about Greek,
Shakespearean, and modern tragedy. That is, in addition to the close readings you might
perform, the philosophical-critical links you might develop between Freud and Aeschylus here,
or Plato and Shakespeare there, you need to know things about the cultural situation of Greek
tragedy (its history, performance context, metrical and rhetorical conventions, etc.), the history
of transmission of Greek and Latin tragedy (editions, translations, imitations, reputation), the
textual status and performance contexts of Shakespearean tragedies, etc. You will remember the
standard sources for Shakespeare, and there are a few obvious first ports of call for the Greeks:
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Rebecca Bushnell, ed., A Companion to Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
P. E. Easterling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, rev. by John Gould and D. M. Lewis, The Dramatic Festivals of
Athens, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1991).
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992).
Adrian Poole, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (London: Methuen, 1978).
Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Boston:
MIT Press, 1989).
Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
David Wiles, Tragedy in Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (London: Verso, 1979).
Bernhard Zimmermann, Greek Tragedy: An Introduction (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1991).
You might also want to get started, even at this early stage, with critical and historical reading of
various kinds in both Greek and Shakespearean (or early modern, modern) tragedy. The
following is a list of studies that I have found particularly helpful and suggestive, though it
should not in any way be thought comprehensive.
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to
The Tempest, (London: Routledge, 1992).
A. O. Aldridge, ‘The Pleasures of Pity,’ ELH, 16:1 (1949), pp. 76-87
Danielle Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
James Barrett, Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002).
Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985).
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Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).
Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Helen P. Foley, ed., Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1981).
W. W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion (London: Duckworth, 1973).
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, transl. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977).
Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London: Routledge, 1989).
John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996).
George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, transl. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin, 1971).
F. S. Naiden, Ancient Supplication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
A. D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1983).
Rush Rehm, Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Timothy J. Reiss, ‘Renaissance Theatre and the Theory of Tragedy’, in The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), III, pp. 229-47.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997).
Charles Segal, Sophocles' Tragic World: Divinity, nature, society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995).
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004).
Earl R. Wasserman, ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy,’ ELH, 14: 4 (1947), pp. 283-307.
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John J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin, eds, Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social
Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Topics
As with any paper in the tripos, and especially in Part 2, your scheme of work will be generated
through a productive friction between your supervisor's prescriptive guidance and your resistive
errancy. There are a number of topics one might consider to be basic to the understanding of
literary tragedy in the Greek and early modern traditions, and likely beyond, and a supervisor will
want to stress and to some degree urge these topics upon you; but you will have, or will come to
have, your own ideas, and you should expect to assert them as you embark and continue. At
every stage of your reading and writing next term, you can discuss, debate, and enrich your ideas.
Whatever else happens, please do not consider yourself a passive passenger on the good ship
Supervision. There is no ship; your transit is always sink or swim. The following is a summary list
of some of my preoccupations, when I am reading Greek, Latin, and early modern tragedy; this
list is intended merely to get you started in your thinking, and you will quickly see not only how
many of these topics are inter-related, but also how they might go by other names, and implicate
other concepts.
knowledge/seeming
freedom and fate
ritual
history and example
gods
madness
dissimulation
irony (/foreboding)
money
exile
pride/insolence
law (crime)
justice
sex
women
kindred
suicide
love
the city
the household
the bedroom
material objects
memory
Troy
betrayal
sickness
prophecy
duty/obligation
poetry
translation
chorus (identity, function)
myth
messengers
evidence
prayer
supplication
grief
anger
crime
interest
music/dance
intertextuality
cycles
curse
luck
blindness
fathers and sons
mothers
daughters
faith
revenge
argument/persuasion
language/rhetoric
punishment
pollution
incest
prosody
If you feel a bit at sea with this list of topics, you might try focusing your thinking, for the
present, around one or two of the following, engaging with some of the suggested
questions/ideas:
Temporality. From revenge to prophecy (and curse!) to lamentation to the eschatalogical worldview, tragedies often preoccupy themselves with thinking about the experience of time. You
might find yourself worrying about: the experience of the passage of time (presence, duration); a
sense of disrupted time (repetition, foreshortening, trauma); the temporal aspects of hope, dread,
anger, despair, etc.; the temporal schemes associated with providentialist and rationalist
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ontologies; or the way time is written about or experienced in different media (art, dance, music,
reading or narrative) or genres (drama, narrative poetry, lyric, etc.).
Place and placement. Exiles and homecomers, aliens, city-dwellers, house-dwellers, voyagers,
refugees, and other placed and displaced persons populate tragic writings. Place can sometimes
be used as a metonymy for different forms of legal or moral code, or can be evidence for
something even more fundamental about a protagonist's identity. Place and displacement
naturally provoke lots of questions about embodiment and the importance of the physical self
(with its advantages and disadvantages) to the tragic actor and protagonist. How do writers of
tragedies think about place?
Gods and religion. How present are the gods in classical, early modern, or more modern tragedy?
To what degree are mortals responsible for their own fate, and to what degree are they passive
sufferers of forces beyond their choosing or control? How important is ritual, performance, or
rite to tragedy? (And here you should think past the Greeks – rites and rituals occur not only in
Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, but in various forms in literature throughout the early modern
and modern period – think about revenge, death and funeral, marriage, and so on). How can a
poet or a dramatist create a sense of the mysterious, or sublime? For what reason do we as
readers or audiences seek out such experiences? What place has faith in tragedy, if any?
Epistemology. One of the key strands to emerge from late Athenian tragedy is a preoccupation
with knowledge and the knowable. To some degree this was always present: Oedipus is driven by
a desire to unravel the true history of his origins, and the nature of the curse on Thebes, for
example; but Euripides takes this preoccupation to new heights, in a much technically
epistemological vein – dreams, phantasms, opinions, misjudgments, and various forms of proof
abound in his later plays. Where and how do Shakespeare and his successors pick up on these
philosophical traditions, and why? What have these ideas to do with anagnorisis? Our relationship
to the divine?
Gender. You will immediately notice that Greek tragedy takes a very decisive view of the roles of
men and women in tragedy – women are generally associated with the oikos and men with the
polis, a distinction maintained and broken down to various kinds of effect in ancient works, and
played upon in Shakespeare (think about Othello and Lady Macbeth, for example, or the parallels
and contrast between Ophelia's tragedy and that of Hamlet). Gender may help you to think
about space, about the opposition between passive and active forms of suffering, about the
natural basis for human character (i.e. is there one? and if so, what is it and who cares?), about
lamentation versus tragic action, about sex and erotic tragedy, and of course (you knew if was
coming) about metaphysics and metaphysical anxieties of various kinds.
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