Tag Archives: tragedy

The Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius

Boethius Cover Art Controversy

As far as Penguin covers go, the reproduction from the cover illustration of a thirteenth-century edition of Boethius’ Consolation in the Philosophical Library of New York has to be one of the most confusing:

Boethius Consolation Cover Illustration B&W

Boethius Consolation Cover Illustration B&W

This is from the groovy 1969 edition translated by Watts. Okay, I can see Lady Philosophy. But what.s up with Boethius? I can see his hands, he.s holding in the left hand a manuscript and a quill in the right, but something weird is going on with his head. They.ve done something to give the image a sense of depth, but it obscures all the details. Trying to read the letters is impossible. Maybe you need 3D glasses to make things out? In a later 1986 reprint, someone made the right call:

Boethius Consolation Cover Illustration Line

Boethius Consolation Cover Illustration Line

Ah!–so Boethius has his head at a weird angle! I wonder if these old school illustrations with the words written in banners is a precursor to comic book art. And it.s nice to see someone has sewn back together Lady Philosophy.s dress: in the Consolation it had been torn to tatters from all the different philosophical schools each tearing off a square of the ‘true’ philosophy.

Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Tragedy

So I.ve started reading philosophical works since I.m writing the last chapter of Paying Melpomene’s Price. In the rest of the book, tragedy.s been defined by what it is: structure, audience reception, typology, and so on. In the last chapter I want to do something different. I want to define tragedy by what it is not. It is not history. It is not comedy. And it is not philosophy. One thing I.ve noticed reading all these genres is that they are not very fond of one another. Take Boethius’ Consolation. It starts off with Boethius communing with the Muses of tragedy. He is sad because he has been imprisoned on trumped up charges. They are lamenting together. In comes Lady Philosophy. She calls the tragic Muses harlots (yes, she uses those terms: scaenicae meretriculae!) and tells them to scram. She then proceeds to comfort Boethius with the ‘proper’ consolation of philosophy. But if you look in a work of tragedy, philosophy doesn.t come out looking so well: for example Faust calls philosophy ‘odious and obscure’. The ancient quarrel between the genres of philosophy, tragedy, history, and comedy suggest that tragedy can be defined by the generic boundaries that separated each of these disciplines. In the case of Boethius, how Boethius understood philosophy was that it was based on logic and reason. Defined negatively, the logic and reason of philosophy is not the lamenting of tragedy. So that is what I mean by defining something by what it is not. More on this in a later post as I gather up my thoughts.

Etymology of Tragedy (translating Boethius)

But for now, an interesting thing has come up while reading Boethius. Here.s Watts translation of a passage:

But even if you do not know the stories of the foreign philosophers, how Anaxagoras was banished from Athens, how Socrates was put to death by poisoning, and how Zeno was tortured, you do know of Romans like Canius, Seneca and Soranus, whose memory is still fresh and celebrated. The sole cause of their tragic sufferings was their obvious and complete contempt of the pursuits of immoral men which my teaching had instilled in them.

I was interested to see where the word tragic came from. Here.s the Latin:

quodsi nec Anaxagorae fugam nec Socratis uenenum nec Zenonis tormenta, quoniam sunt peregrina, nouisti, at Canios, at Senecas, at Soranos, quorum nec peruetusta nec incelebris memoria est, scire potuisti. quos nihil aliud in cladem detraxit nisi quod nostris moribus instituti studiis improborum dissimillimi uidebantur.

Interesting! Although Latin has the word for words for tragedy (tragoedia, tragicus, and tragoedus) the term Boethius uses is clades which Watts translates into tragedy.

Strange. So I looked up other things in the ancient world that could be understood to be tragedies in the lay sense of the term. The Fire of Rome (the one Nero reputedly started which raged uncontrolled for a week). Or Hannibal.s victories at Lake Trasimene or Cannae (which gave him control of pretty much the whole of Italy). Suetonius and Livy refer to these events as clades as well. They are not tragicus or ‘like a tragoedia’.

 

Both the Latin and the English terms go back to ancient Greek of course. So there.s where I turned next. What things would we consider to be ‘tragic’ to them? Perhaps the Sicilian Expedition (which put a permanent end to Athens’ hegemony) or The Battle of Salamis (from a Persian standpoint). Again, Aeschylus and Plutarch do not call these events tragoidia but rather sumphora.

So it would appear that the modern sense of the word ‘tragedy’ as in ‘the AIDS tragedy’ or ‘the Challenger tragedy’ or ‘the Chernobyl tragedy’ is completely modern. The ancients had a term for ‘tragedy’ but it could only refer to the art form of tragedy, never to tragedy in terms of a disaster or heartbreaking loss.

Did you know that?–well now you do!

Until next time, I.m Edwin Wong and these are the things that fascinate me on my journey of Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Does Tight Coupling Lead to Tragedy?

The Unexpected

It.s Friday afternoon and I.m finishing off the discussion of a crucial topic: how do dramatists generate unexpected outcomes? Tight coupling is one way. But before discussing tight coupling, let.s talk about the unexpected. Dramatists need unexpected outcomes, because, if outcomes were expected, where would the drama be in drama?–it would be boring without the unknown. But since the unexpected arises from the feeling of suspense, it can.t be entirely ‘out of the blue’ or ‘come out of left field’. In real life, the unexpected can come out of anywhere. A lump in the throat. A knock on the door at a strange hour. The day Kennedy died. But because suspense is a two way street between dramatist and audience–with the dramatist providing clues and the audience fitting together the puzzle–the unexpected in drama emerges from something the audience knows, or, in retrospect, could have known. That.s unexpectation. Which actually is a word: damn you spell check! What I want to share with assiduous readers to day is ‘tight coupling’. It is one way to create unexpectation naturally and seamlessly.

Types of Unexpectation

There.s a lot of ways to introduce the unexpected. Fate and the gods was the preferred old school method. Since the gods are more powerful, they can appear and do all sorts of things heroes don.t anticipate. And if you believe in fate and the gods–or at least believe in them within the context of the pay–you can accept that they cause unexpected things to happen. Other ways of generating the unexpected include: a lack of knowledge, thinking too fast, unpredictable responses from other people (et tu, Brute?), unintended consequences, and so on. Lack of power (fate), epistemological uncertainty (is that Desdemona.s handkerchief?), and ontological uncertainty (should I make a deal with the devil?) all can wrack havoc with expectation. Tight coupling is a little different. It.s different because it.s not a lack of power. You.re not scaling the golden walls of heaven shouting against the gods. It.s not ontological uncertainty (i.e. does God exist?). And it.s not epistemological uncertainty. What is it then?

Tight Coupling

Let.s ask the new god what it is. Wow, prayer answered in 0.59 seconds! Here.s google.s answer:

Google Search 'tight coupling tragedy'

Google Search ‘tight coupling tragedy’

Here.s a definition from a sociological site:

Coupling can be thought of as the distance or slack between individual components. Systems can either be loosely coupled, like cars on a sleepy rural highway, or systems can be tightly coupled, like cars on the freeway at 5pm in L.A.

Here.s a definition from a site breaking down a tragic lesson learned on Mount Everest:

Complex interactions become more dangerous if tight coupling also exists within a system. Tight coupling means one breakdown triggers a series of other problems. Tightly coupled systems have four characteristics: time-dependent processes, a fairly rigid sequence of activities, one dominant path to achieving the goal, and very little slack.

They speak of systems. In drama, tight coupling would be the interdependencies between all the stages in a plan. So, if in order to achieve goal x, you need a, b, c, and d to happen AND if any one a, b, c, or d go awry, x does not happen, well that plan is tight coupled. But if, in order to achieve x, you need a, b, and c to happen AND if one of them goes awry that.s okay because there.s different options available, that plan is loose coupled.

Tight Coupling in Tragedy

Romeo and Juliet is tight coupled. Friar Laurence gives Juliet the sleeping draught so she can feign death. Only he and her know about this. And she.s going to be unconscious so really only he will know. They.ll bury Juliet. Friar Laurence will inform Romeo of the proceedings by snail mail (he.s been exiled to Mantua). Then when she awakes in the vault, they.ll both be there to whisk her away.

The goal is for Juliet to avoid marriage with County Paris: as diligent readers will all know, she.s in love with Romeo and Romeo with her. But there.s just so much that can go wrong with the holy man.s plans: maybe Juliet will have an adverse reaction to the potion (it.s got to be powerful if it knock you out for two days), maybe she won.t wake up, maybe something with happen to the friar, maybe they.ll inter her six feet under too soon, or maybe Romeo will hear of Juliet.s death before the friar tells him the plan! Because so many things can go wrong and because if any one of these things goes wrong, disaster strikes the whole enterprise, Friar Laurence.s plan is said to be tight coupled.

What eventually happens is that Friar Laurence charges Friar John to deliver the letter detailing the plan to Romeo in Mantua. While visiting the sick, Friar John is detained because the sick house is sealed on suspicion of the plague. The letter is never delivered. But Romeo finds out from Balthasar that Juliet has died. The rest you know.

Because the friar.s plan relies on tight coupling, the chances of an unfortunate accident go up. Drastically. The suicides of both Romeo and Juliet can be traced back to Friar John.s failure to deliver. That he failed to deliver is because he visited a sick house that happened to be sealed. The sick house really has nothing to do with Romeo and Juliet. But because the friar.s plan relies on tight coupling, even things that normally have no effect have a crucial affect on the outcome.

Tight coupling is a wonderful way for dramatists to drop the unexpected into their dramas in a way that is believable and convincing. Especially today since tight coupling is widely understood. Our receptivity to tight coupling probably comes from an awareness that tightly couple computer programs can bring down the whole computer necessitating a restart. But here.s what I find strange: besides Romeo and Juliet, I.m drawing a complete blank as to which other tragedies are tightly coupled. I can.t think of even one other one! I know they just have to be out there! Ugh.

Until next time, I.m Edwin Wong and I.m wondering why some days it.s so hard to be Doing Melpomene’s Work!

The Tragedy of Mariam by Elizabeth Cary

It.s funny how the mind seems wired to detect meaningful coincidence, or, in other words, synchronicity out of the jumble of everyday events. Or perhaps it.s good at detecting them because there are meaningful coincidences in our lives! Synchronicity or Littlewood.s Law, you decide! Today I was at Russell.s Books striking out looking for various history titles (Machiavelli, Ibn Khaldun, and Amiannus Marcellinus). But in the Classics section, there was a slender title The Tragedy of Mariam by Elizabeth Cary. It so turns out last weekend, there was a Globe & Fail article by Kate Taylor entitled: We Need to Speak Out About Sexism in the Arts:

If you go to the theatre tonight, you will probably see a play that was written by a man and directed by a man. If a major art show is on your to-do list this weekend, it will probably feature the work of a male artist. If you go to a Hollywood movie, you’ll notice when the credits roll that the director is a man and so are all the screenwriters. Despite all the liberalism of the practitioners, the arts are a really sexist place. Women tend to be equally or overrepresented in theatre schools, film programs and art colleges, but once they graduate they find their male colleagues have more luck launching successful creative careers and are more likely to be offered leadership roles in arts organizations, while the women may find themselves ghettoized in supporting roles such as stage management, marketing and communications.

So, I had been thinking on the question on why there are so few female artists already when I stumbled upon The Tragedy of Mariam. While I could recall female poets (Sappho), composers (Southam), novelists (Kingsolver), and painters (Kahlo…but of course, being in Victoria one must remember to mention the mighty Carr!), I could not think of one female playwright. Instead of walking home with books by male historians, I walked home with a tragedy by Elizabeth Cary.

This is the Broadview edition. They must be a specialty publishing house; haven.t run across them before. There.s a Julia Cameron photograph of ‘Ophelia’ on the cover:

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It.s a rather haunting photograph, especially if this is Shakespeare.s Ophelia that she has in mind (which the flower on the lapel would seem to suggest). The face is relaxed, but some tension is visible in the neck. And with the mouth partially agape, the image looks more like a mask. The back blurb reads:

First published in 1613, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry is the first play in English known to have been authored by a woman, and it has become increasingly popular in the study of early modern women’s writing. The play, which Cary based on the story of Herod and Mariam, turns on a rumour of Herod’s death, and it unfold around the actions taken by the patriarch’s family and servants in his absence. In part a critique of male power, the play sets gender politics in sharp relief against a background o dynastic conflict and Roman imperialism.

I can.t wait to read this play. To be honest, I had not thought the first play I would run into by a female dramatist would be a tragedy. Here.s why. In a way, to me tragedy is at once the hardest and easiest type of drama to compose. It.s easy because the themes come pre-generated from either myth or history. If you.re writing comedy, chances are you have to fabricate all the characters and situations from scratch. With tragedy, you can use myth or history and here Cary has turned to Josephus The Wars of the Jews and The Antiquities of the Jews for the material. It.s harder because it.s emotionally taxing. To bring beautiful characters to life and then to savage them without mercy so that all their best intents come to nothing seems to me to require an emotional distance. Goethe recounted this to Eckermann in his Conversations with Eckermann: he could never be a tragedian of the first rank because he lacked the final bit of detachment and emotional distance necessary to put the tragic into tragedy. I had always thought women in general to be more emotionally aware than men. To me, that would be an impediment to writing tragedy seeing that tragedy requires a sense of detachment.

But hey, it.s so much better to challenge our presuppositions rather than to reaffirm them! I.m glad The Tragedy of Mariam caught my eye at Russell.s Books and I.m looking forward to the read. It.s billed as being in the Senecan style, so it should be a gusher. That it.s Senecan is also a minor surprise, seeing that Marlowe in the 1590s had revolted against the classical Senecan model of drama to launch what may be called the ‘tragedy of the individual’ with his productions of Tamburlaine and Faustus. These in turn paved the way for Shakespeare. So it.s interesting that in 1613 Cary would have went back to a Senecan model (which is what inspired plays such as Gorboduc written in the generation prior to Marlowe and Shakespeare). A bit of an atavism. Stay tuned for more, diligent readers! Mariam versus Herod, what will happen? Until next time, I am Edwin Wong and I will be testing the limits of Doing Melpomene.s Work.