In Sophocles’ view, the tragedy is human imperfection.
As Professor H.D.F. Kitto puts it:
To Sophocles, the tragedy of life is not that man is wicked or foolish, but that he is imperfect; even at his best unequal to a sudden demand made by circumstances … The pity is, always, that man should be so fine, yet ruin all by a single glaring fault; so strong, yet be brought low by stronger circumstances.
In Aeschylus, there is none of that. In his doomed “hero,” we do not have a complete man. We have a fatally flawed man — a man who is lacking something so fundamental that it leads to catastrophe. In King Agamemnon we have a man who is so arrogant that he can’t see why his wife might hate him. He’s blind to his own faults, and so he is blind to the hatred those faults have inspired in a person who is supposed to love him. He’s blind to his fate.
There’s no character development. Agamemnon arrives on stage as he is and forever will be.
Aeschylus’s plays are almost like a science experiment: If you put a fatally flawed person in this situation, this is what happens. Fate drops on him like a hammer.
It happens every time. It’s just physics: the laws of nature at work.
As Kitto points out, in Aeschylus we don’t have suspense. We have foreboding. We know this guy who is leading the community is so tragically flawed he’s going to ruin himself and probably everyone around him.
Aeschylus’s brand of drama went out of style with the more psychologically nuanced plays of Sophocles. But I wish Aeschylus were writing today. I know what he did with characters like Agamemnon and Xerxes. I think I know what he’d do with Donald Trump.
No suspense. Just foreboding.
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