PRINCIPAL TYPES OF TRAGEDY - SHE-TRAGEDY

 

   She-tragedy denotes a tragic subgenre that rose to prominence in England in the mid-1690s. The playwright and laureate Nicholas Rowe who coined the term in 1714 is widely regarded as its finest exponent. His plays The Fair Penitent (1703) and The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) are considered as some of the best representative pieces in the cannon. Other noteworthy instances include Thomas Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage or The Innocent Adultery (1694) and Mary Pix’s Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks (1696). Though she-tragedy formally sufficed as a distinct dramatic form only by the close of the 18^th century, its antecedence could be traced back to the early 1680s and the so called pathetic plays that enjoyed brief popularity at the time. Of noteworthy significance in this regard are the plays The Orphan (1680) by Thomas Otway and Virtue Betray or Anna Bullen (1682) by John Banks, both of which are invariably recognized as forerunners of she-tragedy.    

 

    In appraising the ascendancy of she-tragedy, there are two notable factors to regard, the first of which is the impact of Southerne’s play Fatal Marriage on popular taste. A runaway hit upon release, the work not only proved commercially lucrative, but with its emphasis on feminine suffering, succeeded in forcefully reviving the trend pioneered by Otway and Banks in their pathetic plays. The end result was that a sudden spate of interest was incited for women centered plays among the theatre audience of London, which specialized in exaggerated depictions of effeminacy and sentimentality. The generated interest however would have not amounted to much, if not for a significant development in the city’s dramatic scene at the time. This brings us to the second factor with regard to the rise of she-tragedy, the restoration of two playhouses in the capital.     After being restored as King of England in 1660, Charles II issued patent rights for two playhouses to be set up, the King’s Company and the Duke’s. In 1682, the former collapsed unable to cope with financial difficulties, leading to a merger with the latter. This resulted in the formation of the United Company, which thus came to exercise a monopoly over dramatic productions in London for the next decade. The end result was that the number of new plays produced decreased significantly, and an over reliance on stock plays sufficed as the order of the day. The situation finally changed in 1695 when some of the leading actors of the time broke away from Drury Lane, and set up their own independent company under the leadership of the celebrated actor Thomas Betterton. The development proved critical in that it not only resulted in an increase in the number of plays produced, but in the light of the success garnered by Southerne’s play, also paved way specifically to the production of dramas featuring careworn women. The fact that the Betterton Company had among its ranks two of the most eminent actresses of the time, Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle, abetted and accentuated the move. It was of course not long before the rival United Company also jumped into the band wagon, and a flurry of dramas focusing on portraying the travails of an ill-fated woman soon came to dominate in both theatres.

 

    The vogue for she-tragedy thus anchored, continued to thrive into the early years of the 18^th century, which in fact turned out to be its phase of prime popularity. Though discarded ever since, it must be acknowledged that she-tragedy exemplifies attributes that were not only radical at the time, but eventually served to influentially shape the evolution of English tragedy in the due course. Some of the typical features peculiar to its framework discussed below amply elucidate the point.

FEMALE SUFFERING: A she-tragedy is basically called so because its plot is centrally concerned with the misfortunes of an innocent woman, who is typically portrayed as a hapless victim of an unwitting mistake or a deliberate crime. In other words, she-tragedy typifies a type of drama centering on female suffering, which is at once its most redeeming yet repugnant character. It is repugnant because women in it are essentially depicted as pitiable creatures born to suffer, whose sole lot in life is to endure adversity. As if this is not disparaging enough, such a depiction is done so in a purposely overblown manner that anyone viewing the play would be inevitably compelled to conclude that it is just not worth living life as a woman. On the other hand, the aspect also epitomizes its most redeeming attribute in that the play represents the first time ever a distinct cannon of drama, that too a tragedy, was explicitly focused on projecting a woman as its central figure. This is indeed a considerable step forward with regard to bolstering the stature of women in tragedy, given the fact that they were previously condemned to relatively marginal roles in English tragic plays.

 

PASSIVE FEMININE: In delineating the heroine as a suffering being, she-tragedy reinforces her status not just as a characteristically hapless but a helpless individual. This is to say, she is not just upheld as a victim of adversities that range from rape to adultery, but a person utterly incapable of putting up any fight or resistance in the face of such disasters. Apparently all that the protagonist of a she-tragedy can do is simply suffer, and this aspect of passivity is invariably espoused as the defining mark of feminine virtue. The notion of course is fundamentally derived from the many conduct books for women brought out in the late 17^th century, in which even the barest attempt at self-defense is eschewed as unbecoming of a true woman. Tears are a woman’s most potent weapon, and submissiveness is her behavior proper: this is the ideal of womanhood that the conduct literatures of the time promulgated, which the heroines of a she-tragedy perpetuated. Ultimately the heroine in a she-tragedy exemplifies the epitome of an anguished female, who is not simply stripped of social or political authority but power over her own personal self. The point that she sometimes comes to suffer temporary insanity overwhelmed by her misfortunes in the play, bears out the idea quite literally.

 

PRIVATE WOES: Though in the heroic plays of the early restoration itself, a shift in the central concern of a tragedy from state to personal affairs was initiated, it was not until the advent of she-tragedy that the latter truly became the forte of English tragic plays. The action of the plot in a she-tragedy after all, was not just focused on events pertaining to the private sphere of family life, but both exclusively and explicitly confined to them. The misfortunes they portrayed represented in fact a tale of wholly private woes, in which the incidents and situations delineated typified those that could befall anyone everyone. She-tragedies in short strove to exemplify humanity for what it is worth, consciously avoiding heroic scales of action that hinted at larger than life implications. It must however be specified that for all their insistence on delineations of domestic incidents, she-tragedy derived their characters principally from the upper strata of the society. This is to say, the woes enacted were private, but the personae that enacted them were noble. Notwithstanding this point, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that she-tragedy marks by far the most distinctive and progressive development in the annals of English drama at the time, as far as the democratization of the tragic cannon was concerned.

 

PATHETIC IMPACT: The avowed objective of a she-tragedy in its exaggerated displays of female suffering is to invoke powerful spectacles of what was then called distress, which we more commonly refer to as pathos today. It is however noteworthy that the success of a she-tragedy in this regard not only depended on the intensity to which its central female characters felt emotions, but also the extent to which they were able to provoke it in those who viewed the play. In other words, the true worth of a she-tragedy was basically determined by the degree to which it was able to move the audience to tears, which in turn depended on how well or effectively the suffering was exhibited on the stage by the heroine. This is where the fact that restoration theatre permitted actual women to impersonate on stage, and was fortunate to have gifted female actresses performing on it, becomes a critical consideration. After all, no matter how skilled the pre-adolescent boys who played the female roles during the renaissance were, it is highly unlikely that they would have been able to successfully pull off the kind of intense performances that a she-tragedy demanded of its female characters.

 

RAPE: Writers of she-tragedy often sensationalise their depiction of female suffering through incorporating rape into their plots. The basic objective is obviously to heighten the intensity of the pathos invoked, in order to move the audience as profoundly as possible. After all, the spectacle of a woman suffering herself to death, deeply moving as it is, is bound to be amplified many times over when it results from a deliberate crime she is forced to suffer at the hands of a villain. Rape therefore serves as an effective means in a she-tragedy of maximizing the impact of distress on the spectators, but this is not the only end it served. It is noteworthy that in restoration theatre where a great deal of emphasis was placed on visual effects, scenes of rape were often presented with explicit spectacles of disordered or torn clothing, which exposed parts of the breasts and legs of the female performer to the gaze of the audience. Such tableaus while no doubt moving the audience passionately, also titillated them erotically, fulfilling at once both their carnal and nobler sensibilities.