Other Forms of Tragedy

Aside from the tragedy of the ancient Greeks, great tragedy has been created only in three other periods and places: England, from 1558 to 1625; seventeenth-century France; and Europe and America from the mid-nineteenth century to the midtwentieth century. Like Greek theater, Elizabethan drama arose out of religious ceremonies. Gorboduc, by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, the first formal tragedy in English, was performed in 1561, but Christopher Marlowe, who wrote in the late 1500s, was the first tragedian worthy of the Greek tradition. Shakespeare produced his five greatest tragedies in the first years of the 1600s. However, tragedy as a drama form began to decline after Shakespeare. During the 1600s, however, dramatists in France were also attempting to bring back the ancient form of Greek tragedy. Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine represent the best of the French neoclassical period. These playwrights closely followed the Greek models...