Kelly on Tragedy

Henry Ansgar Kelly’s Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993) is a careful and useful study of the use of the word “tragedy” from the ancients through the 14th century. He narrowly focuses on the uses of the word-group itself, and shows that the word meant many different things to different writers. Along the way, he makes a couple of important observations: a) Many writers in the later patristic period and the medieval period had virtually no idea of how tragedies were actually performed in the ancient world, and some had no idea that they were performed. b) Tragedy virtually disappeared during the medieval period, until revived in England by Chaucer (a revival examined in Kelly’s companion volume, Chaucerian Tragedy ). When medieval writers wrote of tragedy (and few actually did), they spoke of it as an obsolete genre, something done by the poets of antiquity but no longer practiced. c) The influence of Boethius on medieval notions of tragedy is very important. Intriguingly, Boethius characterizes the incarnation as a tragedy, apparently thinking of the “incarnation and passion to involve a fall of sorts” yet one that “had the happpy result that many were taken up into the Godhead.” Boethius maintained this favorable view of tragedy even he wrote about the connections between tragedy and fortune: “What else does the clamor of tragedies bewail,” he has Fortune say, “but Fortune overthrowing happy kingdoms with an unexpected blow.”

Kelly’s study is rich in specific details, and helps to clarify in what senses Christianity was and was not seen as compatible with tragedy.