Tableaux

Plural of tableau, French for painting or picture. It is used in drama to refer to a visually pleasing and emotionally compelling arrangement of actors' bodies on stage. First recommended for wide use by theorist and playwright Denis Diderot in the eighteenth century, such consciously contrived stage pictures did gain prominence in the centuries that followed, particularly in melodrama, which often called for them in the stage directions.

Theatron

Greek word for theatre, literally "the viewing place."

Tragedy

A Greek word believed to mean "song of the goat-singers" (see satyr play and dithyramb). Originating in the sixth century b.c.e., tragedy is the oldest dramatic genre and remains for many the "highest" form of poetry. Our knowledge of it derives mainly from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as from the little we know about the manner of its performance (see ag¯on, chorus, mask, orchestra, sk¯en¯e, and tragic tetralogy). Our understanding of it has also been shaped by Aristotle, whose description of Athenian tragedy in his Poetics remains a touchstone for tragic theory and practice to this day. According to Aristotle, tragedy is the imitation of an organically unified, serious action in which the plot, or arrangement of incidents, elicits the audience's pity and fear and then effects a catharsis, or purgation, of these and similar emotions. Tragic plots generally take the protagonist from a condition of good fortune to bad, often to his or her destruction, involve mental and/or physical suffering, and ideally take place within families, usually of a socially elevated or prominent type (royal families, for example). In Aristotle's view the most effective tragic plots also involve a simultaneous "reversal and recognition," a moment when the character's fortune turns for the worse, and when he or she is suddenly able to grasp a truth that was unavailable before. Tragedy has been reconceived by every subsequent age that has practiced it, beginning in the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, it was reinvented according to the principles of neoclassicism; in the eighteenth according to those of the Enlightenment ("middle-class" or "bourgeois tragedy"). Romanticism in turn created its own tragic forms, often inspired by Shakespeare. Notable re-thinkings of tragedy in the modern age include Arthur Miller's essay "Tragedy and the Common Man." See also working-class tragedy.

Tragic Tetralogy

A four-part tragedy. Mostly associated with the (non-comic) plays of Athens in the fifth-century b.c.e., it consisted of one satyr play and three tragedies written on related themes. Another famous tragic tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelung, was written in the nineteenth century by composer Richard Wagner. This four-part "music drama," created in imitation of Greek tragedy, is based on the heroes and gods of Germanic myth.

Tragi-Comedy

A genre of drama in which many elements of tragedy are present, but which generally has a happy end. Corneille's The Cid is an excellent example of this genre, which was sometimes preferred to straight tragedy under neoclassicism. See Fuenteovejuna.


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