MACBETH

        #HOW IS SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY ( WITH REF.TO MACBETH ) A COMBINATION OF GREEK AS WELL AS MODERN DAY ABSURD THEATER?

                  *  Shakespearean tragedy 

                                      &

                           Greek tragedy  

* DEFINITION OF TRAGEDY :-

                Tragedy (from the Greek: tragōidia) is a form of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsis, or a "pain [that] awakens pleasure", for the audience.

                 The essence of tragedy, be it Greek or Shakespearean is the rendering of human suffering and a contemplation of the nature of man’s destiny in relation to the universe. It is here that all tragedy is one. But an in-depth analysis of the features of tragic drama as was in vogue in ancient Greece reveals that in structure and conceptualization, classical Greek drama has some differences with the tragedy as practiced in the Elizabethan times, especially by Shakespeare.

            

                    William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard").His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets,  two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

                       Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon,  Warwickshire.At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway,  with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs,  and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.     

                                    

 

                   GREEK TRAGEDY was a popular and influential form of drama performed in theaters across ancient greece.The tearm "TRAGEDY" divided from the words "TRAGOS" meaning goat and "OIDE" meaning song.

                      During the festival of Dionysus, tragedies were staged as part of compilation. Choruses were dressed in loin skin of goat. A goat was the prize given for the best tragedy. 

                   PLAYWRIGHTS

*Aeschylus, his plays include agamemnon, The Libation, The Furies.

*Sophocles : Antigone, oedipus the, The women of trachis.

*Euripides : Medeia.

                   Greek tragedies were of great influence for all the play wrights of the world. Inspiring from the greek tragedies many wrote plays. Among this the one which in considered to be influencing the whole world even after centuries of it's publication is the "SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY ".

             "HE WAS NOT OF AN AGE,                                  BUT FOR ALL TIME ".

                    The famous phrase include by BEN JONON in his poem entitled "To the memory of my beloved, the Author, mr. William Shakespeare ".

                  Shakespeare was not only a man of his own age but he lived throughout the ages and will continue to live the coming ages, because he has attained a kind of immortality through his writings. 

                       TRAGEDIES 

*Titus Andronicus

*Romeo & Juliet 

*coriolanus 

*Timon of Athens 

*Macbeth 

*Hamlet 

*Antony & Cleopatra 

*Julius Ceaser

*King Lear

*Othello 

                      Even if shakespeare never followed the Aristotelian unities, the influence of greek drama could be seen in his tragedies. There are some similarities as well as the difference between two. 

                       Both the Greek tragedies and Shakespearean tragedies shows the fall of protagonist who holds a high position in society, from glory to wretchedness. There should be a central character and the plot should be  revolving around the central character. 

             

                     A study of the tragedies written by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus, shows that ancient Greek tragedy is basically modeled upon an essentially religious weltanschauung. Accordingly, Greek tragedy represents the philosophy of men’s puny insignificance in the face of a colossal divine power that controls and mostly destroys human life. The emphasis here is laid upon the inscrutable power of Fate or Destiny, capable of bringing about havoc and ruin to human life. 

                      The utter helplessness of men in his struggle against such a malevolent and uncontrollable divine power is the substance of classical Greek tragedy. The most obvious example is that of Oedipus in Oedipus Tyrannous who commits a sin in such ignorance that the impression of an overwhelming sinister destiny that rules and destroys his life is paramount. Similar examples are, 

*Sophocles’ Antigone or *Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.

                    The most striking contrast in this fatalistic world view of the Greeks’ is found in Shakespearean tragedy where the entire emphasis is laid upon the responsibility of the individual in bringing about his ruin. Though Aristotle has pointed out that the Greek tragedies also portrayed the mistaken actions of the hero and therefore the Greek tragedies also showed an element of awareness of tragedy resulting from human flaws, the error of judgment of the hero or his hamartia is always conditioned by Destiny. 

                     That is, however much the hero makes mistakes, the overall impression is that he is led to committing those errors under the snares and pitfalls of Destiny. In Shakespearean tragedy the emphasis, however, is upon human action independent of Destiny where, however, the impression of fate working upon man is also not totally negated. For instance, there is no doubt that Macbeth’s ambition leads to his sacrilegious murder of Duncan which results is his doom, but there is also the impression of the witches that precipitate his murder. 

                     Similarly Othello’s tragic destiny is brought about entirely by his misjudgments resulting in his overwhelming Jealousy, but there is also the impression that Othello is so pitted against certain evil forces over which he has no control. Actually, the Greeks had a theocentric vision while the Elizabethans, motivated by the Renaissance laid stress on the vision of an anthropocentric universe. Hence crux of tragic action lay with a divine power in Greek tragedies while the individual hero and his actions were of prime importance in a Shakespearean tragedy.

                        In matters of structure, the Greeks were much more fastidious about the unity of action. The unity of action implies that the action represented in a play should be just one single whole without any digressions what so ever. As a natural corollary the unity of action stood the unities of time and place. The unity of time implied that the time represented in the play should be limited to the two or three hours it takes to act the play or at most to a single day of either twelve or twenty four hours. 

                    The unity of place implied that the tragic action portrayed in the play should be limited to a single location. These three unities were observed for the sake of verisimilitude, that is, for the achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience. Shakespearean traged  completely dispenses of these three unities. A Shakespearean tragedy takes place often in two or three places, and the time taken is much more than twenty-four hours, often spurning a month or even more. Moreover, often in plays like king Lear or Hamlet there are sub plots which run counter to the Greek notion of the unity of action.

                    The Greeks employed the chorus as a dramatic device. The chorus, as stated by Aristotle, was often a group of characters who remained aloof from the action and commented upon it by singing or chanting verses and performing dance like maneuvers on the stage. They represented traditional, moral, religious and social attitudes and often took part in the action. In Shakespearean tragedy there is a complete absence of the chorus.

                  Shakespeare needs no chorus for commentary while the action is what constitutes the play. But whereas in Greek drama the chorus offered time gaps between two sets of tragic actions; in a Shakespeare play this is achieved by comic relief. An ideal example is the Porter Scene in Macbeth. In a classical play there were no room o comic elements in a tragic actions but Shakespeare so artistically manipulates characters like Fool in King Lear that they become integral to the tragic action. 

                      Finally, the introduction of ghost, witches, strange visions and fearful phenomena that is the deus ex machina or the supernatural apparatus, which is so rampant in Shakespeare, is never made use of in Greek tragedies. The witches in Macbeth or Banquo’s Ghost in the same play, or the Ghost of Hamlet’s father in Hamlet or Caesar’s spirit in Julius Caesar are all instruments of horror which the Greeks avoided.

                  It should, however, be kept in mind that these differences in convention and style should never blind us from the truth that both Shakespeare and Greek tragedies fulfill the same purpose of presenting before us the enormous vision of human grandeur that issues from the struggle of man with in transient forces either at work within him or outside and that both these two types of tragedies show that heroism lies not in victory or defeat but in courageous endurance of pain and hostility. 

               Macbeth VS Greek Tragedy

                    As appletrees said, Shakespeare's play cannot be a Greek tragedy because it is an English play.  However, it is like a Greek tragedy in the sense that Macbeth has many of the qualities of a tragedy.  According to a guide on Greek tragedy provided by Grand Valley State University (see link in sources), a Greek tragedy is defined as a play that shows the destruction of a tragic hero through "hubris (pride), fate, and the will of the gods."  One could certainly make a case that Macbeth meets all three criteria by showing how Macbeth is ultimately destroyed because of his desire for power and position (a sense of pride is what causes us to desire these things), because of his chance meeting with the witches (fate), and because of the role the witches (are they gods?) played in leading Macbeth down a path of delusion.

                   Further, one could easily prove that Macbeth is indeed a tragic hero.  VCCSLitonine provides an excellent summary of Aristotle's ideas about tragic heroes.  A tragic hero must be of noble birth or high stature (Macbeth certainly is), he must be imperfect or fallible (consider how easily manipulated Macbeth is), he must have a tragic flaw (his murderous desire for power and his weak nature that allows him to be manipulated by both his wife and the witches), 

                     His downfall must be a result of his own choices (he has ample opportunity to spare Duncan's life, but he chooses power instead), his fate is not wholly deserved (this would be the hardest one to prove, but one might point out that had it not been for the witches and Lady Macbeth, Macbeth himself would have never chosen the path he took), he must ultimately accept his demise with nobility and grace, recognizing his fatal flaw in the end (which Macbeth clearly does in the final scenes of the play.

                 THEATRE OF ABSURD 

                  Theatre of the Absurd, dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early ’60s who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s assessment, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose. 

                    The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of those works. Though no formal Absurdist movement existed as such, dramatists as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet,  Arthur Adamov, Harold Pintrr, and a few others shared a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and to control its fate. Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious.

                       The ideas that inform the plays also dictate their structure. Absurdist playwrights, therefore, did away with most of the logical structures of traditional theatre. There is little dramatic action as conventionally understood; however frantically the characters perform, their busyness serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their existence. 

                    In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), plot is eliminated, and a timeless, circular quality emerges as two lost creatures, usually played as tramps, spend their days waiting—but without any certainty of whom they are waiting for or of whether he, or it, will ever come.

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