The Relationship Between Our New Sense of Time and Our sense of an Ending in Tragedy

Tragedies, which by general consensus over a long period of time are acknowledged to be great, seem to be confined to specific periods. They appear to have been composed at those times when a civilization regarded itself as a chosen people. If we use as examples the Athens of the 5th century before Christ, the France of the Roi Soleil, the England of the Elizabeth who was “Gloriana,” or perhaps even the America of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Henry Miller, we will quickly realize that the heroes with whom we are concerned demonstrate a progressively changing relationship with their audience. The Greek heroes are by definition related to the gods, Shakespeare’s protagonists are kings or at the very least gens de condition—people of the highest importance in the state—whose fall involves the fate of a people. By way of contrast, the protagonists of O’Neill, Williams, and Miller are all too much like ourselves.1 We are not here directly concerned with defining tragedy or even with relating it to death—for Oedipus and Electra tragedy does not seem to require death and in Death of a Salesman the death may be less a tragedy than the closure of one—but we are concerned with the influence on tragedy of an increasing awareness of clock time and of geographical place. The subject of this paper is the change in the tragic hero’s function or status as well as the narrowing of the discrepancy between the time and place of the hero and that of the audience. These changes were conditioned by changing attitudes to chronology.