The Claims of the Ideal

Abstract

George Steiner in his The Death of Tragedy claims that the medieval images of tragedy survived into the great period of Western drama, but that through Shakespeare and those who followed him new dimensions came into view. By the time we reach Ibsen’s ‘claims of the ideal’ we certainly go beyond the simple and terrible fall of the great, the reversal of fortune, and the final catastrophe. Unity of time and space had already been abandoned by Aeschylus in the Eumenides and could hardly be restored in modern plays, when fools and clownery mingle with scenes of madness and slaughter. One marvels that the classical model still survived at all, as in Racine’s work and, even more surprisingly, in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. At a time when life and death could no longer be squeezed into classicist forms or Christian belief, the inherited ideal of a synthesis of Biblical story, Greek form and Western pathos of language could achieve an emotional appeal. From 1600 to the present time the ancient style still counts for something, even if a secular atheism increasingly displaces the Christian framework.