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If only I'd realized sooner, so many lives could have been spared!
(Impact followed by falling glass)
The Dionysia was a multi-day festival, held once a year in ancient Athens.
And yes I promise, you didn't misclick! This is still a trope talk.
Possibly established by noted Dionysus-loving tyrant Pisistratus,
most of the Dionysia was dedicated-
-to a theatrical competition that spanned at least three days.
Playwrights would show off their work with-
-the performance of a three-part dramatic tragedy,
followed by a more lighthearted and comedic satyr play-
-to cheer everyone up with dick jokes and prop humour-
-after three days of heavy bad feels.
This is, nominally, the origin of tragedy as we define it nowadays.
Those Greek plays performed during the Dionysia-
-were the first recorded tragic narratives we have.
Only a few Greek tragedies have survived to the modern day;
Most notably Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles's Oedipus trilogy,
and quite a lot of stuff written by Euripides.
Conveniently I actually have videos about a lot of these plays,
so I'm not gonna go too in depth in the summary here.
And besides, the structure of the original Greek tragedy is much more interesting.
So Greek tragedies were partially sung, and the cast was split between-
-the dramatic players, the characters in the actual story-
-who respected the fourth wall-
-and never broke from the narrative to acknowledge the audience;
and the chorus, a group of somewhere between twelve and fifty masked men-
-playing a strange liminal role in the storytelling.
The chorus's primary role was to discuss the story in meta terms,
including addressing the audience,
explaining the context for what was happening,
commenting on the events of the story,
and occasionally engaging with the dramatic players,
who sometimes responded them,
but sometimes couldn't seem to see or hear them.
So essentially you had the dramatic players doing-
-the actual play,
the chorus commenting on the story while occasionally dipping into the plot,
and the audience watching it all play out from behind the fourth wall.
Structurally, the plot of most Greek tragedies had some very common themes,
Which Aristotle handily laid out for us in his "Poetics".
Most Greek tragedies start with a hero of great status or prosperity;
wealth, royalty, political power, whatever the reason-
-the hero's on top of the world.
For instance in "Oedipus Rex", the archetypical Greek tragedy,
Oedipus is king of Thebes with a beautiful wife and several children,
now there's a guy who's got his life sorted out!
Good thing there's no dramatic irony on the way!
Now this rule is actually the most flexible of the bunch,
because it doesn't even apply to all the plays Aristotle had to work from.
Sophocles's "Antigone", for instance, begins with Antigone,
daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, defying a royal edict-
-to go and bury her brother's bodies after they died fighting each other-
-in a Theban civil war, partially brought on by-
-the unsettling reveal at the end of Oedipus Rex.
Antigone might be royalty,
but she's pretty far from great status or prosperity at this point.
You could make an argument that the antagonistic "King Creon" fills the role-
-of tragic hero in this story, since he starts off as king-
-and ends up responsible for his own downfall,
but the play is not named "Creon", so...
Anyway, the hero of negotiable status and prosperity is all well and good,
but the next key ingredient is that the hero has a fatal flaw.
Some inherent character trait that doesn't change over the course of the narrative.
This trait was referred to as "Hamartia", roughly meaning "The Sin".
In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus's hamartia is stubbornness.
He can't be persuaded to stop searching for answers about why-
-his kingdom is ravaged by plague.
The character's fatal flaw ends up causing a reversal of fortune, or "Peripeteia",
when their hamartia leads them to doing or discovering something terrible-
-that changes the trajectory of the story.
This reversal of fortune is an inevitable consequence of their fatal flaw,
and equally inevitable is the consequences of the peripeteia,
where our hero falls from prosperity.
Again in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus's desire for answers leads him to the horrrible-
-revelation that he unknowingly killed his own father-
-and married his biological mother,
and this crime against nature is what's been causing misfortune in Thebes.
In the end the character loses the enviable situation they had-
-at the beginning of the story, and usually dies,
leading to a slow wrap-up and a denouement,
and very importantly, the audience experiences catharsis when this happens.
Now catharsis isn't always a good feeling, but it's satisfying in some way,
the story comes to a close and-
the audience leaves feeling satisfied on some level.
Even if they're not happy about anything that actually happened.
Oedipus Rex doesn't have anything resembling a happy ending,
but damn if it doesn't tie up all those loose ends into a nice little bow-
-which is coincidentally, also what it did to Oedipus's family tree.
So Greek tragedies usually build off of these four story beats;
character is in a good place, character has a flaw, the hamartia-
-that causes the reversal of fortune, the peripeteia,
character experiences inevitable downfall, curtain falls.
But thanks to the narration of the chorus,
and the semi-permeability of the fourth wall,
there's another sneaky key element in Greek tragedy,
which is the third-person omniscient audience.
The audience of a Greek tragedy gets to see everything that's going on,
and the chorus usually fills them in on the things they don't already know about.
This isn't 100% applicable,
for instance, Oedipus Rex is actually kind of a mystery on top of being a tragedy,
since the whole plot is Oedipus looking-
-for the man responsible for his kingdom's bad vibes.
And he doesn't learn he's the culprit until-
-20% of the way into the story-
-when the soothsayer Tiresias tells him it's his own fault on line 350.
So yeah for most of the story the audience basically knows where this is going,
and even before we know Oedipus is the culprit, we know that Tiresias-
-doesn't wanna tell him who the culprit is-
-because it won't help, and it'll be really bad for him.
So for most of the runtime the audience has an omniscient perspective-
-on the story, telling us what everyone's doing, what everyone's motives are,
and broadly what's about to happen; Though not necessarily-
-everything that happened before the events of the play,
preserving some of the mystery.
There's no sudden twists or shocking swerves here.
In a greek tragedy everything is slow, but inevitable.
The audience knows what's coming, so it's not a question of-
-if we're going to get there, but when and how.
So we see Oedipus slowly putting the pieces together,
and we already know the broad outline of the picture it's going to form,
because we're given all the information we need to get the general gist.
Oedipus is going to realize that somehow, this is his own fault.
This audience angle is, I think, the most important part of tragedy.
The audience needs to see the tragedy coming so we get that sense of dread.
It's like the Hitchcockian definition of suspense-
-I talked about in the plot twists video.
If suddenly a bomb goes off, the audience is shocked for a few seconds,
but if we're told ten minutes in advance that a bomb
we have ten whole minutes of building dread.
Tragedies thrive on this;
If suddenly everything goes wrong and the peripeteia and the fortune reverses,
we're upset for about however long that scene lasts.
But if we get the hamartia, we see the stage set, we recognise how-
-this character's fatal flaw is going to clash with their circumstances-
-and trigger the reversal of fortune,
we're dreading it every step of the way!
The most important part of the tragedy is the dread, not the surprise.
And unsurprisingly,
this key trait shows up a lot in the next big wave of tragedies.
After Greek tragedies kind of faded out of focus when Rome took center stage,
there was a small sprinkling of tragedies in the next millenium-and-a-half,
Roman stoic Seneca wrote a handful of roman tragedies-
-about classic Greek tragic heroes,
but it seems the later Christianization of the region kinda pulled the focus away-
-from these sad stories about icky pagans.
There was very little tragic action until the late 1500s,
when playwrights started taking a retroactive interest-
-in the great classics.
For a few decades, Elizabethan audiences saw a surge in revenge plays,
stories when a wronged party wreaks bloody vengeance on the wrongdoers.
Until they were entirely out-competed by the bard himself, Shakespeare.
Now our boy Shakespeare wrote a bunch of tragedies,
most of which I've conveniently covered on this channel-
-although I can't in good conscience recommend those videos-
-because it was years ago and the video quality causes me physical pain,
but you can check out Blue's "History Maker" video on the subject,
which is still very good.
But anyway, I know this might be a bit of a hot take,
but Shakespeare was
And his tragedies follow the Greek tragedy format quite closely.
He didn't incorporate the chorus, but to make up for their absence-
-his characters would sometimes turn to the audience-
-and soliloquize at them directly to make sure they were up to speed.
This is a very very important addition that really had an impact,
so once again, Shakespeare; good at his job.
Most of his heroes started off in positions of great prosperity,
young nobility, royalty, warrior heroes, et cetera.
They all had solidly established characters and character flaws,
those flaws led directly to their reversals of fortune,
and the body counts got pretty insane!
Romeo and Juliet is probably the most famous tragedy he ever wrote.
And he tells us right out the gate what's about to happen:
"A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;"
we're not wondering
we're waiting to see how this all goes so wrong.
The inevitability of the tragedy is baked in.
And the funny thing about Romeo and Juliet is before Mercutio dies -
- spoiler alert -
- the play is a bog-standard Elizabethan romance;
Two beautiful young people in love, comic relief side-characters,
hilariously unreasonable parents,
even a couple extra love interests for our two heroes-
-who will probably end up as paired spares in the end.
But the fatal flaws don't let that happen.
The reversal of fortune hits just before the mid-point of the play and-
-every character quirk leading up to it is perfectly foreshadowed.
Romeo's a diehard Romantic who walks on clouds whenever he's in love,
Mercutio's a prideful cynic with a very snarky attitude,
and Tybalt is a hot-headed arrogant dickhead, who represents-
-all of the dumbest parts of the familial feud.
Act three, scene one opens, and Romeo-
-walking on sunshine thanks to his secret marriage to Juliet-
greets Tybalt in a very friendly way, which weirds out both-
-Tybalt, and Mercutio, who think he's being a wuss.
Tybalt gets angry and challenges him,
but obviously Romeo is too love-happy to fight his own new-family,
and then Mercutio gets mad at Romeo for backing down and-
-draws to fight Tybalt instead.
During the fight, Romeo intercedes to try and get them to stop,
because of corse he doesn't want anyone to fight.
And that's where Tybalt stabs Mercutio, realizes he might have goofed, and runs.
Mercutio, ever theatrical, monologues all the way to his grave,
and his friends don't seem to realise he's serious until he's actually dead.
Yeah, the comic relief character dies!
Holy shit, right?
In modern rom-com contexts, that'd be like if the asshole boss-
-shot the gay best friend halfway through the movie.
Romeo curses his own fatal flaw for letting this happen,
his love for Juliet held him back from taking this seriously-
-and allowed his best friend to die.
When Tybalt returns, Romeo kills him, and with that turning point out of the way,
it is officially all downhill from here.
And this is actually a good example of something very brilliant-
-that Shakespeare did, he added one interesting twist to the genre that-
-gave his plays something really special:
Collateral damage.
See, in the OG Greek tragedies, almost all the focus was-
-on the tragic hero, and their immediate loved ones.
Oedipus learns the horrible truth and gouges out his eyes,
Jocasta kills herself in shame,
and their children have to grapple with the fact that they're all-
-half siblings with their own dad.
But they're all central to the tragedy since the tragedy is
-messed up family line,
the audience knows what's coming for them.
The tragedy is a very simple straight line on paper.
Once Oedipus pieces it together, we may not know exactly how they're gonna react,
but we know it's not gonna be good.
In Shakespeare's tragedies, while we know they are going to be tragedies,
they also give us a fairly large secondary cast of characters-
-who are tangential to the main tragedy,
And how they're affected is almost completely unpredictable.
This means a Shakespearean audience only has a
While we can still predict the general structure of the downfall-
-and identify the fatal flaw that'll cause it,
we can still be blindsided by how it impacts the secondary characters.
In Hamlet, we know right out the gate that Hamlet has to avenge his father's murder,
but overthinks everything way too much, so it's gonna take a while.
He's indecisive to a fault and lets quite a lot of opportunities pass him by-
-while he complains and monologues.
But we know that eventually, he'll kill claudius and the play will be over.
What we don't expect is Ophelia, while Hamlet's tearing around the castle-
-muttering to himself and yelling about how everybody sucks,
his love interest Ophelia fully goes insane,
because Hamlet treats her like sh*t, and also murders her father.
So she stumbles on stage, singing inappropriate songs-
-and handing out flowers to everyone, before going off and dying off-stage.
Ophelia's death is the only time the story goes out of it's way to show us that-
Hamlet's constant dithering has actual consequences.
Monologuing is not a victimless crime,
the tragedy is actively ruining the lives of everyone it touches,
God damn!
Romeo and Juliet does the same thing with Mercutio,
the audience could see that Romeo and Juliet's-
-familial shenanigans were inevitably going to lead to problems,
but Mercutio was tangential to all that and didn't have to die.
Shakespeare's tragedies have central structures that are-
-very simple hamartia-peripeteia- reversal of fortune dealios,
but they also hit us with unexpected side-tragedies,
where the main tragedy inadvertently hurts the secondary characters in ways-
-we couldn't see coming, and that didn't need to happen.
And this is brilliant!
Because it shows us a side to the tragedy that's almost more tragic.
The inevitability of the core tragedy is very important,
because it gives us that sense of anticipatory dread, but that-
-surprise kick of collateral damage helps drive home the broader-
-meta-tragedy that this unfortunate situation is going to hurt-
-a lot of people who don't deserve it at all.
Greek tragedies featured collateral damage but they didn't focus on it.
Oedipus's children didn't deserve any of the stuff that happened to them,
but they don't really get any focus until Antigone gets her own plays.
Collateral damage that surprises the core tragic players just as much-
-as it surprises the audience is that Shakespeare secret ingredient-
-that sets his plays apart from the Greek tragedies they drew on.
And that's not the only rule of tragedy Shakespeare breaks!
On top of collateral damage, his tragic protagonists sometimes-
-undergo character development, which is usually kind of a no-no,
since in order to keep that downfall inevitable,
the hero's fatal flaw can't really change.
Lady MacBeth's fatal flaw initially appears to be power-hunger,
and Macbeth's, cowardice,
since she is super on board with the whole "kill the king" thing and he's really not,
even though he kinda wants to anyway.
But then it turns out Lady MacBeth's-
-murder eyes are bigger than her murder-stomach-
and she gives herself crazy PTSD from all the murdering, and meanwhile-
Macbeth gets over his cowardice and-
-goes into full power-mad Disney villain territory.
Watching their mental states deteriorate is another angle of the tragedy,
by killing the king, they destroy themselves psychologically,
and orchestrate their own inevitable downfall.
It's pretty harrowing.
Now roughly simultaneous with Shakespeare,
tragedy was taking another leap forward in a totally different direction-
-with the invention of opera.
Italian composer Jacopo Peri, also known by the frankly ridiculous pseudonym-
-"Il Zazzerino",
was intrigued by the song aspect of Greek theater and expanded on that concept-
-to write the first Opera, "Dafne",
as well as the first surviving opera, "Euridice".
Now I''ll admit, I am not the biggest opera expert,
but in the immortal words of well-known trickster deity Bugs Bunny:
"What'd you expect from an opera, a happy ending?"
Opera is notorious for being a huge downer,
and as another descendant of Greek tragedy it's inherited a lot of the core traits.
The lineage of Greek tragedy is still going strong,
and despite some pretty inexplicable rumors to the contrary,
tragedy has survived to the modern day as a popular story format.
Modern tragedy plays pretty close to the basic rules of the original Greek tragedies.
The hero starting out in a good place is still very negotiable,
but the rest of the structure is holding strong.
The hero has a fatal flaw, the fatal flaw causes their downfall-
-by triggering the reversal of fortune,
the hero falls and/or dies, and the audience gets some tasty catharsis.
The audience sees the tragedy coming from basically minute one,
giving them a sense of mounting dread with the awareness-
-that there is no way this story will end well.
Now while I'd hesitate to call 1949 "modern",
the 1949 play "Death of a Salesman" is pretty much the go-to example-
-for a modern tragedy these days.
And it's an interesting case, because its creator, Arthur Miller,
was deliberately trying to break some of the rules of tragedy.
Specifically the first one,
where the hero needs to have a lot to lose over the course of the play.
Far from Shakespearean nobility, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman-
-is the aging, unsuccessful salesman "Willy Loman",
who spends the play obsessed with his American dream of being the #1 salesman,
and dismissing every other possible world-view as a waste of time-
-or an excuse for failure.
He's purposefully written as an extremely mundane everyman,
and his ultimate fatal flaw is his-
-absolute unwillingness to accept his own mediocrity.
In the hardest hitting line of the play his son Biff,
the closest thing the story has to an actual hero,
tells his father "I am a dime a dozen, and so are you",
in a tragic plea to get his father to understand that chasing exceptionalism-
-and constantly inflating his own self-image has kept him from ever-
-having an actual life that could make him happy.
The ultimate tragedy of the story is that-
-Willy can't accept what he really has and who he really is,
it's a very small, uncomfortably mundane tragedy, which makes it much sadder-
-than the more dramatic tragedies of the downfalls of kings.
Death of a Salesman is scarily relatable.
Everything about it is painfully plausible,
and the mediocrity of it all just enhances the tragedy.
When the eponymous salesman eventually dies for-
stupid, preventable reasons, that he was explicitly told wouldn't work out for him,
the only people who care are the family members who were so caught up-
-in his world-view they'd become trapped in his cycle of self-delusion.
The ultimate tragedy of this story is how small it is.
Similar to how Shakespeare recognized-
-that collateral damage is its own form of tragedy,
Miller recognized that everyday, mundane despair and delusion-
-is also a form of tragedy,
and dropping it into a classical tragedy makes it twice as tragic.
At least when Hamlet's life fell apart he got a cool swordfight out of it.
The basic structure of tragedy is that the character's fatal flaw-
-causes their downfall and the audience can see it coming,
but beyond those core rules almost anything goes.
The tragic hero doesn't need to be hugely successful or powerful,
they don't need to learn any lessons,
and if you're willing to really depress your audience-
-you don't even need that catharsis factor for the ending.
So modern tragedies sometimes break the Aristotelian mold-
-without losing what actually makes them tragedies,
and regularly supplement the core structure-
-with non-traditional tropes to spice up the tragedy.
But even at their most basic and by-the-book,
tragedies aren't quite as simple as they look,
for one thing, a tragedy is usually only a tragedy from one character's perspective.
Since the tragedy typically centers on the tragic hero,
they are the character whose perspective we follow.
We see their flaw, we see their downfall, we watch them crash and burn.
But from everyone else's perspective,
the tragic hero is just going through the wringer,
and how that affects them varies from story to story.
For instance: Hamlet, from the perspective of anyone who isn't Hamlet-
-is a full-on psychological horror.
Troubled young man is haunted by a ghost,
driven mad and kills quite a lot of people?
Yikes!
Othello is in the same boat.
From Desdemona's perspective, her loving husband slowly gets-
-more and more withdrawn, starts spending more time with his friend,
who she's pretty sure doesn't like her,
and then strangles her out of nowhere!
Tragedy is a matter of perspective.
The tragic hero and the audience both see the story in terms of-
-the hero's tragic inevitable downfall;
But all anyone else sees is the collateral damage,
which usually takes the form of a horror story.
And we can actually flip this on its head,
plenty of stories that aren't tragedies by any stretch of the imagination-
-become tragedies if we shift the focus to a different character,
frequently the villain.
Shakespeare aside, my favourite example of this specific phenomenon is-
-Kung Fu Panda 2! Because nobody ever sees it coming.
Ah, got ya with all this Shakespeare and opera talk!
You nearly forgot I'm not classy at all!
If we pretend the main character of that movie is not-
-our beloved bouncing panda protagonist-
-but instead the stylish and dastardly villain Lord Shen,
we get a classic Greek tragedy format.
Hero hears prophesy of downfall,
takes drastic steps to prevent said downfall-
-and is eventually destroyed as a direct result of those very actions,
up to and including being literally killed by his own weapon.
This was very deliberate, there are plenty of classical tragedies-
-hidden in the background of other stories.
We just don't notice because we're used to-
-having sympathetic bad guys or tragic backstories.
Sounds obvious out loud, but behind most tragic backstories is a tragedy.
Sometimes the hidden tragedies become more obvious-
-when we get prequels or spin-offs of more classic adventure stories that explore-
-the tragic backgrounds of future villains,
or future dead families of future heroes.
The original star wars trilogy is a full-on hero's journey adventure series,
but when they did the prequels and "Clone Wars", it highlighted-
-that Anakin's character arc is a textbook tragedy.
Things start out pretty good for him,
as a prodigiously powerful and well-respected Jedi warrior-
-with friends and a wife who love him;
but his fatal flaw is quite literally caring too much.
And while the prequels pulled off this character quality-
-with all the grace and subtlety of a rhinoceros on roller-skates,
the Clone Wars actually did make us believe that-
-loving his friends too much was a real genuine fatal flaw-
-that was going to cause Anakin's fall to the dark side,
and turn him into the stoic living respirator we all know and love.
Which brings me to another interesting point,
fatal flaws are entirely a matter of circumstance.
Any character trait can become a flaw in the wrong situation.
What makes the tragedy inevitable is that the character's unchanging trait-
-bumps up against a situation that turns it into a flaw,
and from there the reaction is inevitable.
It's been pointed out before that if Hamlet and Othello swapped tragedies,
neither tragedy would have happened.
Othello is emotional and impulsive, so all Iago has to do is rile him up and-
-point him in the right direction to get a murder going;
While Hamlet is hesitant and calculating to the point of anxiety,
and refuses to do anything without monologing about it for forty lines first.
If Hamlet were dealing with Iago's machinations, he'd overthink everything-
-for a full 48 hours and make dead sure-
-the person he was supposed to kill actually deserved it.
Meanwhile if a ghost popped up and told Othello to kill someone-
-for murdering his dad-
-the dude would probably be dead before the ghost was even gone.
If Hamlet were impulsive, only Claudius would have died.
And if Othello were a calculating overthinker,
Iago would be super in prison before the week was out.
The recipe for a tragedy is usually less about the character trait-
-and more about the circumstances that would turn that trait into a fatal flaw.
A fatal flaw is just an innocent character trait-
-in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So really, crafting a tragedy is more about making a situation-
-that’s totally incongruous with your characters’ strengths,
or redirects them in harmful and self-destructive directions.
And because it's such an emotionally loaded exploration-
-of a character's depths and flaws,
it's totally understandable that this genre has lasted so long.
Character driven narratives are compelling.
And tragedies are like trainwrecks,
you kinda can't look away.
So... Yeah.
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