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Rome. Did it exhaust its possibilities as a dramatic genre, leaving a
host of grand scale theatres empty in its wake? Did the idea of
tragedy lie moribund in the accounts of lexicographers in the interim
period before it slowly seeped into other genres (such as poetry and
fiction), waiting until suitable conditions for stage drama prevailed
again? This crux lies at the centre of tragic theory. While some
scholars believe that something essentially tragic was lost by the
second century BCE, never to be revived (in other words that tragedy
could not adapt beyond a certain point), others are willing to see the
evolution of tragedy as a series of adaptations and mutations that
connect the original form with what exists now.21 Thus, instead of
subscribing to Nietzsche’s proclamation that tragedy ‘died’ almost
in its birth throes, after losing its Dionysian inspiration, or to
George Steiner’s claim that it met its demise in eighteenth century
France, killed off by rationalism, we can instead see tragedy as
having undergone various alterations, some of them amounting to
radical mutations, but still recognize it as a genre.22 This would not
only provide a rational snub to the essentialist argument—tragedy
is essentially Athenian and what was not written in ancient Athens
is therefore not tragedy—but it would also allow us to look at other,
more important issues. On these grounds, to take one small example,
the actual presence of a chorus need not be a decisive feature if one
can either show that the function of a chorus has been replaced by
some other element in a tragedy or that it has become vestigial. This
approach seems a good deal more sensible than trying to prove that
Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot,
Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams et alia did not write tragedy
because their plays do not conform exactly to the Greek model.
21 The ‘decline’, if not actual demise of tragedy may be traced back as far as Aristotle, who believed,
three centuries after its inception, that the form was no longer as important as it had once been.
Since that time, Sophocles and Aeschylus have traditionally been considered as masters of the
genre and Euripides as being on a somewhat lower level, a judgement erroneously based on the
number of times each won the coveted first prize.
22 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, London: Penguin, 1993. The
post-Sophoclean decline and ultimate demise of tragedy is referred to a number of times in the
text. See especially, though, Section 11, pp. 54–59. Although Steiner gives no specific date, he
makes it clear that modernity offers compensation for tragic fate by removing the concepts of
eternal suffering. Rousseauism, in asserting the ‘perfectability of man’, effectively ‘closes the doors
of hell’ and thereby renders tragedy impossible. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, London:
Faber, 1961, p. 127.
ADAPTATION STUDIES AND BIOLOGICAL MODELS: ANTIGONE AS A TEST CASE