“It is about time someone wrote a new Poetics,” my friend said. He was thinking of Tragedy, of course, and he looked hopefully at me, or so my vanity led me to believe. And it occurred to me at once how easy it would be to join this enterprise of drafting new or modified “laws” for tragedy, and how difficult to extricate oneself from it. There hasn’t been a generation since the fifteenth century that hasn’t tried to rewrite Aristotle’s text whether by interpretation or augmentation. Yet nothing absolute has ever been said on the subject that went perceptibly beyond the prejudices or ambitions of a period, a nation, a species of litterateur, or a class of play-goers and readers. The very effort to define the limits of tragedy appears to have introduced more confusion into criticism and playwriting than it has eradicated.

Despite the high praise it has received from critics and the interest it has inspired in nearly every age, Euripides’ Medea offers certain problems in interpretation which have never been satisfactorily resolved. It is rather paradoxical, in fact, that a play of such enduring vitality should so often have been found unsatisfactory in one aspect or another. Adverse criticisms generally have been directed at three problems: the interpretation of the character of Medea, the purpose and relevance of the scene with Aegeus, and the resolution of the play. The first source of difficulty, a certain ambivalence in Euripides’ characterization of Medea, has evoked contradictory claims: that she is “one of the most tragic figures of the tragic stage,” but that she arouses no tragic pity in the spectator; that she is a brilliant achievement in humanizing a legendary figure; that, on the contrary she is not intended to appear human but primarily supernatural and demonic.

By the time that Shakespeare set out, probably sometime in 1605, to retell the ancient story of King Lear and his daughters, he had already approached the problem of man's relation to the forces of evil from various directions, and in doing so he had developed certain distinctive modes of tragedy. In King Lear Shakespeare’s primary emphasis is upon the process of human regeneration. That he chose for the hero of such a play an old man at the very end of physical life was thematicaUy appropriate, for the emphasis is upon a spiritual rebirth for which man never can grow too old. Shakespeare dramatically juxtaposes the physical age of his hero against the new manhood he attains through suffering, and thus he asserts dramatically that Lear's four score years of pride and self-deception were merely the prelude to life, and not life at all.

We are indebted to psycho-analysis for much valuable insight into the psychology of tragedy. Not only has psycho-analysis made us recognize that the “tragic guilt” of the hero, postulated by aesthetics, actually stems from the repressed Oedipus-wishes of the dramatist but it has also drawn our attention to the interrelation of dramatist and audience; that is, to the fact of a common guilt as the decisive psychological factor which, on the one hand, enables the dramatist to create his work and, on the other, produces the Aristotelian catharsis, or “purging of the passions.” Freud, in particular, established the psychological traces of the primal crime in classical tragedy and following in his tracks, Winterstein has recently subjected the origins of tragedy to intensive study and radically clarified them.

By contrast, how little has psycho-analysis bothered about comedy! So far it has hardly attracted any interest worth mentioning: at most it was granted a modest domicile in that basement of research, the footnote, there to be dealt with in a cursory manner.

A concept of the theatre has been lost. And in direct proportion to the manner in which the theatre limits itself only to allowing us to penetrate into the intimacy of some puppet or to transforming the spectator into a Peeping Tom, it is to be expected that the elite will turn away from it and the crowds will go to the movies, the music halls, or the circuses, in search of violent satisfactions which at least have no false pretenses.

After the wear and tear to which our ensibilities have been subjected, it is certain that, before all, we have need of a theatre that will awaken us: heart and nerves.

The misdeeds of the psychological theatre since Racine have made us unaccustomed to that violent and immediate action which the theatre must possess.