Akin to Aristotle’s attempt in the Poetics to lay out the various conditions of artistically rendered human action that make for the most gripping treatments, Hegel develops a poetics of action that attempts to articulate what makes for the most beautiful artistic presentations of action. This chapter focuses on this “poetics of action,” and it is argued that the key to understanding Hegel’s aesthetic privileging of heroic action in his poetics lies in the peculiar ontology of the artwork itself: that is, it is argued that the decisive, transformative events that are the focus of scenes of heroic action in effect provide art with that express content that most readily fits with the artwork’s own deeper nature as such a transformative event in its own right. The chapter explores various of Hegel’s specific aesthetic judgments about dramatic settings, characters, narrative structure, and the role of ethics in art, in each case arguing that the basis of these judgments is oriented both in terms of the heroic and in terms of what enables the character of a transformative event to become most manifest.

This chapter treats the aesthetics of human action. It begins by taking up athletic contest in particular, for insofar as the performance of athletic action serves to make conspicuous how an otherwise given, natural body becomes the vehicle for a striking realization of spirit’s freedom and autonomy, its eventful unfolding can serve as a kind of aesthetic standard for assessing the other forms of action as well. However, most of our actions prove to be rather lackluster in comparison, and when Hegel turns to the aesthetic prospects of practical life in the context of modern civil society and the state, he finds only what is prosaic, action here being defined on all sides by contingency, dependence, and exposure to external forces. Hegel would have us see that the aesthetic limitations of practical life are rooted in inherent, ontological limitations of practical life itself – what this chapter calls the tragedy of the practical – implying that there is no question of seeking a higher form of practical life that would be free of such limitation. This limitation is surpassed only by redefining ourselves, not exclusively in practical terms but in the terms of “absolute spirit,” whose first form is art.

Characters curse storms, power blackouts and climate change sceptics in twenty-first century drama as the destructive force of climate change is theatrically represented across comic farce, realist tragedy and dystopian horror. While these theatrical forms differ in their affective and emotional impact, they commonly predict ecological disaster in the future. Disaster is broadly understood as the combination of historical and social determinants interacting with natural hazards and forces over time. Climate change disaster is framed in scenarios that range from humorous to terrifying and with a growing dramatic genre of futuristic climate fiction (cli-fi) about ecological collapse and political dystopia. Twenty-first century dramatisation presents both the absurdity of humanity’s inability to reduce carbon emissions and global warming and the tragedy of predicted disaster on a geological scale in the Anthropocene. At the same time, contemporary performance illuminates turning points in time turning points in time including a different outcome within the present including within the present.

This essay examines the oracular responses of the oracle of Dodona portrayed in fifth-century BCE Attic tragedies. This analysis explores the wording of the oracular answers, characterized by extreme conciseness and clarity, and the topic of the queries, on household security, family matters, and final journeys. The evidence from the lead tablets at Dodona corroborates this focus, showing that while the oracle addressed various concerns, a significant number of private queries dealt with family, health, marriage, and travel. Additionally, the responses from Dodona were brief and straightforward, in contrast to the cryptic nature of Apollo’s oracles at Delphi.

Chapter 5 thus turns to the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry”. Whereas my starting point in Chapter 4 was the paradox of the written critique of writing, here I begin with the apparent contradiction of Plato’s mimetic critique of mimesis in the Republic. For Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger, this is key to understanding Plato’s critique of poetry: Plato does not condemn mimesis entirely. Instead, he subordinates the imaginative and persuasive powers of imitative poetry to philosophical goals and thus weaves poetry and imitation into his own masterful compositions. All three readings point differently but decisively to the limits of autonomous or unaided philosophical discourse, and therewith anticipate some of Heidegger’s insights on the necessity of something like poetic thinking.

In a series of articles and essays, the literary critic Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972) portrayed the history of modern Hebrew literature as a history of crisis: of the breakdown of the old traditional world of religion and faith and the emergence of a new secular world. Kurzweil saw this history as a tragedy. Though the figure of crisis became associated with Kurzweil, he was by no means the first critic to employ it. In fact, it has played a central role in modern Hebrew literary criticism since its inception. Indeed, crisis emerged as a privileged figure for portraying the relationship between evolving literary forms, themes, figurations, and vocabulary to rapidly changing demographic, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. In this chapter, I attempt to contextualize Kurzweil’s ideas within the framework of crisis and tragedy in Hebrew literary criticism, and then briefly suggest their potential implications for the present moment.

The importance of the body – in its own right and as a political, cosmic, and metapoetic symbol – in Attic and Senecan tragedy has long been recognized in scholarship, as has the significance of contemporary medical theories for these plays, but this motif has not been discussed in relation to the surviving fragments of Ennian tragedy. Yet those fragments – frustratingly exiguous though they are – feature substantial depictions of Alcmeo’s mental and physical pathology, the war-wounds of Eurypylus, and Thyestes’ verbal dissection of his brother Atreus, alongside numerous briefer references to disease, injury, and the body. This chapter explores these Ennian engagements with the body and medical theory through various historicizing lenses; with due caution, moreover, it explores the ways in which these lenses can be used to build a provisional picture of the role of the medical and the corporeal in the poet’s tragedies.

The importance of music is conspicuously evident in Cicero’s responses to Ennian tragedy: he refers to connoisseurs who could identify characters from single notes played in the tibia and to accompanied performance. The metres used in the fragments of Ennius’ tragedies reveal that Ennius made the Greek tragedies he adapted considerably more musical, and that music contributed significantly to the plots and emotional tone of the plays and to Ennius’ portrayal of character. In his Medea, for example, Ennius appears to have added music to Medea’s initial address to the chorus (90 TrRF II), to the agon between Jason and Medea (92 TrRF II), and to Medea’s final farewell to her children (97 TrRF II).

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

This chapter takes a new look at Ennius’ Andromacha and particularly at her self-description as arce et urbe orba sum (23 TrRF II). Scholarship has well explicated how the formulaic words arce et urbe characterize Andromacha, to quote Jocelyn, as “a stateless person in terms of Roman law” (Jocelyn 1967). But scholarly focus on the religious formula has obscured the equally poignant allusion encoded in her choice of verb. Orbus is a word whose primary definition is of a child deprived of their parents or, conversely, of a parent who has lost a child. This chapter explores how Ennius boldly harnesses these familial connotations to create an arresting metaphor that totalizes Andromache’s loss. In doing so, he subtly genders Andromacha’s meditation on the loss of her recent past as well as significantly prefiguring the greater loss that the audience (but not yet Andromacha) knows is coming by the tragedy’s end, the tossing of Astyanax from the arx of Troy.

This chapter offers an analysis of the reception of Ennian tragedy in republican Latin poetry, focussing on Pacuvius, Accius, Lucretius, and Catullus. The main methodology employed is that of intertextual analysis. The main thesis advanced is that, while Ennian tragedy seems to have retained its generic distinction and importance in subsequent tragic poetry of the second century bce, by the late Republic, Ennius seems to be more important because of what he has come to represent as a poetic figure and as a repository of poetic material than as a tragedian or epicist.

Ancient audiences ascribed personal religious views to individual playwrights – a fact that confirms ‘personal religion’ as a meaningful category in the study of ancient Greek society in general and the theatre in particular. Aeschylus was especially devoted to Demeter; Sophocles was exceptionally pious; Euripides was hell-bent to show that there were no gods. The oeuvres of these playwrights inspired such inferences, to be sure, but other factors mattered too. Comedies staged the tragic poets as characters and ascribed various religious views to them. Face-to-face encounters with the playwrights gave rise to anecdotes and recollections, which no doubt circulated orally but were also occasionally written down. All this meant that the playwrights could build on their public personae and assume that audiences would recognize characteristic concerns in their plays. We uncover a dynamic set of interactions in which the poet shaped his plays but was also shaped by how audiences received them. We show that we should not construct an opposition between personal and polis religion: The religious views ascribed to the tragedians were personal and communally owned.

The Wire is an example of the way that new technologies and methods of dissemination have made realism possible on television. Where broadcast TV required episodes that could be watched independently and that were structured by the need for commercial interruptions, pay networks such as HBO and the more recent streaming services allow for long-form narratives that develop over many weeks and stretch on for years. The Wire has been widely recognized for its realism, which, however, is usually equated with what is seen as the program’s accuracy. I show how it makes use of conventions of realism inherited from nineteenth century fiction, which are enabled by its structure as a long-form program. The Wire makes use of genres not typically associated with realism, including crime fiction (the police procedural), TV’s police melodramas, and the ancient genre of tragedy as a plot form in Hayden White’s sense. The series incorporates this variety of genres in the service of a vision of ordinary life that continually surprises the viewers. The Wire thus demonstrates the power of new forms of television to represent social complexity to a degree not found in media other than print.

Chapter 5 is a study of Troilus and Criseyde, a poem that showcases Chaucer’s transformation of the language of blisse into that of erotic and transcendent joy. Chaucer constructs a new language of love’s joy indebted to the French and Italian traditions while at the same time shaped around an innovative semantics of love’s blisse. This language, crucially, constructs itself in opposition to philosophical felicity: in quasi-apophatic discourse, the poem expresses the ‘passing’ quality of the lovers’ joy, which exists beyond the conceptual language of philosophical happiness. This last chapter focuses on the writing of love’s joy within tragedy: the bliss of love is what it is because of its precarity, because it is surrounded by death. But if Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers an exceptionally memorable scene of joy, it is because of its use of a transcendent language of bliss that arrests, albeit briefly, the passage of time.

In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the finest and noblest life. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition may seem deeply counterintuitive, lacking core tragic notions of loss, failure and suffering, but Plato would say these depend on prior conceptions of gain, success and flourishing. Ideal tragedy includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best should be imitated as best; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as living the best life.

In this chapter, I provide an interpretation of the famous claim at the end of the Symposium that “the same man” ought to be able to write both comedy and tragedy, and a speculative reconstruction of the arguments that Socrates might have used to secure that claim in his discussion with Agathon and Aristophanes. I argue that ideal comedy and tragedy are unified in at least three ways. First, they constitute a teleological unity, in that their ethical imitations both aim at moral improvement; second, they constitute an ethical unity, in that they both rely on, and endorse, a single theory of value, according to which wisdom and virtue are good and ignorance and vice are bad; and third, they constitute an epistemic unity, in that the objects that they imitate – ridiculousness and seriousness in agents and actions – form opposite parts of the same branch of knowledge, such that one cannot know one without knowing the other. I further argue that actual comedy and tragedy are unified but in a much weaker sense that does not involve any knowledge. In the end, I discuss the possibility of tragicomedy and consider in what sense it might be correct to understand Plato’s dialogues as tragicomedies.