What are the great tragedies?

I have to turn in a paper on the 12’th proving that “Hamlet” was a tragedy (my own topic choice). I will be borrowing heavily from Edith Hamilton’s “The Greek Way”, in which she stated that the four great tragedians of all time were Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. What works of theirs should I read? Preferably nothing too long, I do not have much time to read them. Are their any other great works by other authors that I should cover?

Shakespeare can be tough to get through due to the dense language. If you can get your hands on videos of full text productions of the plays (don’t just trust the big movies based on the plays) then this is one of the few times I would recommend watching instead of reading. Assuming you’ve read Hamlet (you would have to in order to write about it) then I’d go with King Lear, MacBeth, and Julius Cesar. That should be a good mix while sticking to some of the more common Shakespearean themes.

Sophocles is best known for his Thebian plays and these are short reads, maybe one act each. With a good translation you can read these fairly quickly. Those are Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. I ran through all three on a short flight a couple of years ago.

As for the other two, it’s been too long since I’ve read them to recall anything of substance. :slight_smile:

you should also look at Norse mythology. tragedy to the nth degree

I think for Euripedes Medea is the most well-known. And, boy, is it depressing.

You also might want to check out:

Henrick Ibsen’s Ghosts
William Butler Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand
Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms
and
August Strindberg’s Miss Julie

All of those are fairly excellent tragedies.

Sophocles…I think he wrote the Oedipus tragedies, right? Antigone and Oedipus Rex are his most famous tragedies.

I’d have to say my love life qualifies :frowning:

The greatest tragedy is that Howard Hughes didn’t make me his heir.

The Bacchae by Euripedes is also very well known and very gory.

We’re assigning you a lot of reading for this week, huh?
:smiley:

Aeschylus is best known for the Oresteia, which, if memory serves, is the only surviving complete trilogy of Greek tragedies (comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides). (The three surviving plays about Oedipus by Sophocles are the remains of three different trilogies.)

Questions like this always remind me of Victor Borge’s handy way to tell whether an opera is a tragedy or a comedy: “The thing to do is look at the stage just before the final curtain falls. If anyone’s still standing, it was a comedy.”

MdTeague by Frank Norris. It’s a novel, not a play, but is definitely in the tragic mode (as is the movie made from it, Greed, one of the greatest of all films).

Is there any special reason why you’re concentrating on Greek tragedies, which Shakespeare probably never read, rather than Latin or earlier English ones, which he certainly DID read?

I’d suggest you read some Seneca (Thyestes is short and will certainly keep you awake at night) if you want to know where the revenge plot of Hamlet comes from, and just about anything by Marlowe if you want to know what else was on stage in Shakespeare’s time.

You might also want to look up some Elizabethan definitions of tragedy – Sidney’s Defense of Poesy is a good place to start, but bear in mind that Shakespeare wouldn’t have agreed with all his ideas – and see how they differ from Greek ones.

Yersinia Pestis said:

Very true…it’s basically about a group of women running around the country side raping men and practicing “Sparagmos”. Tearing and ripping of flesh of living goats and animals if memory serves…

mmmmmm - yummy huh?
You could always read Dante if you want to.

Not classical but a classic: “The Sorrows of Young Werther” by Goethe

Hey you guys! I need stuff that I can read in just a few hours, not novels! I think that I will go with the greek responses.