For the purpose of judging and examining plays, understanding genre enables clarity. In the Poetics, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) defines tragedy as an imitation of a single, unified, action that is serious, complete, and has a certain magnitude. Tragedy deals with the fall of someone whose character is good, believable, and consistent; importantly, the fall is caused by an error or frailty (hamartia – tragic flaw) rather than a vice or depravity. Philosophies about fate, fortune, and circumstances may intersect with the misfortunes of the hero, but the ups and downs of life are related to the issue of free will (not destiny) in the settling of plot.  It is at the point of free will that revenge tragedy takes a distinct generic turn.

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This is the difference that marks tragedy from comedy: comedy is inclined to imitate persons below the level of our world, tragedy persons above it. . . . Comedy is, as I have said, an imitation of lower types; though it does not include the full range of badness, nevertheless to be ridiculous is a kind of deformity. The causes of laughter are errors and deformities that do not pain or injure us; the comic mask, for instance, is deformed and distorted but not painfully so. . . . The next best plot, which is said by some people to be the best, is the tragedy with a double plot like the Odyssey, ending in one way for the better people and in the opposite way for the worse. But it is the weakness of theatrical performances that gives priority to this kind, when poets write what the audience would like to happen, they are in leading strings. This is not the pleasure proper to tragedy, but rather to comedy, where the greatest enemies in the fable make friends and go off at the end, and nobody is killed by anyone. –Aristotle, The Poetics

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Plato, in his Symposium, suggests that one could ascend the latter of love to glimpse truth in the beauty of the Forms; through love one could know beauty/truth. He also states in book ten of his Republic that: “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.” Plato believes that imitation of sensible objects removed the poet, and the observer, from truth and reality by inspiring the emotions of pity and fear. Plato argued that philosophical knowledge is far superior that the mere imitative nature of art. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, seems to also climb the ladder of love literally, metaphorically, and contextually to achieve the supreme artistic expression, Platonically speaking.

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Dante Alighieri was an epic poet who had grown out of a classical, pagan past into a pre-Renaissance Christian. While Dante was not familiar with the actual texts of Homer or other ancient Greeks, he was versed in their literature having discovered them through his own Italian predecessors, Virgil, Statius, Horace, and Latin translations of Aristotle and his Christian student Thomas Aquinas. With the Roman poet Virgil as his guide, Dante is able to traverse Hell and Purgatory; Dante recognizes Virgil as the image of Human Wisdom or rationality, not to mention the author of the Aeneid. Dante also considered Virgil to have anticipated the coming of Christ (Purgatory 70-2). Therefore, with Virgil as both his literary and rational guide and Beatrice as his beatific and heavenly inspiration, Dante is able to write his allegorical pilgrimage through Hell and the cosmos: The Divine Comedy — called a “comedy” because Dante the pilgrim journeys from grief to joy and “divine” because of the content and the artistic style. Yet along the path to salvation, Dante must purge himself of his own sinful nature, which will eventually include the repudiation of his own self. This journey begins in Hell where Dante hears the stories and witnesses the suffering of many sinners, some of which he empathizes with, and most of which he pities.

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Ezra Pound, in his essay “The Renaissance,” writes: “The first step in a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing” (214). Pound suggests that a renaissance artist needs to develop his own “table of values” from his great predecessors — values that he likens to a painter’s palette of pure colors which an artist can “make out [his] own spectrum or table” (215). While Pound was hoping to foster a twentieth-century renaissance, his words seem equally as applicable to the artists of the Italian Renaissance. Renaissance artists renewed the work of the classical, pagan tradition of Greece and Rome and combined it with what they learned from the Christian Middle Ages, and with a syncretism unique to the Renaissance, made something new that was supported and validated by tradition. What came out of this tradition during the Renaissance may be illuminated by the great “renaissance men” of the time like Leonardo, who, in his Notebooks, suggests a new art based on the pragmatic and verifiable, i.e., “true science” away from the religion and superstition of the Christian middle ages to observable, empirical truth and a trust in the capacities of humanity.

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A tragedy must not be a spectacle of a perfectly good man brought from prosperity to adversity. For this merely shocks us. Nor, of course must it be that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity; for that is not tragedy at all, but the perversion of tragedy, and revolts the moral sense. Nor again, should it exhibit the downfall of an utter villain: since pity is aroused by undeserved misfortunes, terror by misfortunes befalling men like ourselves. There remains, then, as the only proper subject for tragedy, the spectacle of a man not absolutely or eminently good or wise, who is brought to disaster not by sheer depravity, but by some error or frailty. Lastly, the man must be highly renowned and prosperous — an Oedipus, a Thyestes, or some other illustrious person. –Aristotle, The Poetics

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