Who is Sophocles

Sophocles ( in English; ancient Greek Sophokl?s, probably ; c. 496 BC-406 BC) was the second of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus and earlier than those of Euripides. According to the Suda, a 10th century encyclopedia, Sophocles wrote 123 plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, Trachinian Women, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus.Suda (ed. Finkel et al.): s.v. [http://www.stoa.org/sol-bin/search.pl?searchstr=sigma+815 ]....

Category: File - :Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia in The Grecian Daughter, 1782.jpg|thumb|right|225px|Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia in a 1782 production of Murphy's tragedy The Grecian Daughter.

Tragedy

(Middle English tragedie < Middle French tragedie < Latin tragoedia < , trag?idia, "goat-song""tragedy", p. 1637 in E. Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Volume II L-Z, Elsevier (1967)) is a form of art based on human suffering that paradoxically offers its audience pleasure.Banham (1998, 1118). In his speculative work on the origins of Athenean tragedy, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche writes of this "two-fold mood": "the strange mixture and duality in the affects of the Dionysiac enthusiasts, that phenomenon whereby pain awakens pleasure while rejoicing wrings cries of agony from the breast. From highest joy there comes a cry of horror or a yearning lament at some irredeemable loss. In those Greek festivals there erupts what one might call a sentimental tendency in nature, as if it had cause to sigh over its dismemberment into individuals" §2 (Speirs 1999, 21). While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization.Banham (1998, 1118) and Williams (1966, 14-16). That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity?"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.Williams (1966, 16). From its obscure origins in the theatres of Athens 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, or Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering, or Müller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change.Williams (1966, 13-84) and Taxidou (2004, 193-209). A long line of philosophers?which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze?have analysed, speculated upon and criticised the tragic form.Felski (2008, 1). See Dukore (1974) for primary material on most of these philosophers' writings on tragedy and Carlson (1993) for an analysis of them. Walter Benjamin's major work on tragic form is The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928). Gilles Deleuze develops his theory of tragic representation in his collaboration with Félix Guattari, Anti-?dipus (1972). In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general, where the tragic divides against epic and lyric, or at the scale of the drama, where tragedy is opposed to comedy. In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic and epic theatre.See Carlson (1993), Pfister (1977), Elam (1980) and Taxidou (2004). Drama, in the narrow sense, cuts across the traditional division between comedy and tragedy in an anti- or a-generic deterritorialization from the mid-19th century onwards. Both Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal define their epic theatre projects (Non-Aristotelian drama and Theatre of the Oppressed respectively) against models of tragedy. Taxidou, however, reads epic theatre as an incorporation of tragic functions and its treatments of mourning and speculation (2004, 193-209).