Characters

Abstract

‘The first essential,’ Aristotle said, ‘the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and … the Characters come second.’ Modern interest in stage characters, and in the ‘tragic hero’ in particular, is not something which seventeenth-century French dramatists or critics appear to have shared; action and its problems came before the psychological study of persons in crisis. But the framework of the plot has to be clothed in some way, and, as we have seen, writers of French classical tragedy followed their predecessors in choosing as protagonists the kings, queens, emperors and other persons in authority who had been deemed suitable from Aeschylus onwards.