Tragedy Ancient and Modern

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank Lee Danes and Jason Hoult for reading my review essay and for sharing with me their comments on it.

Notes

1. See Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay 2.

2. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays come from the Pelican Shakespeare editions. King Lear 4.1.27–28 and 5.3.181, 185–286, respectively.

3. The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. 2, Sophocles, ed. David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 1224–39.

4. No source for this quotation is provided. Billings’s grasp of Christian theology appears shaky. Christ is not “a part of the divine,” and when he calls the Christian God “incorporeal,” he invokes Platonist rather than biblical ideas, given the concepts of the Incarnation and the Trinity (see 184.) Billings also mentions the fact that for Schelling Christianity cannot be tragic since it is “unable to recognize the essential tragic conflict of freedom and necessity,” as found in Greek tragedy (128). But he fails to see that modern tragedy is constituted by the principle of good, which always has to confront evil (human sin). Terrible evil (violent death) erupts, but it is life (the will to existence), always, that Shakespeare celebrates in his tragedies (as in his comedies and romances). See my Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011).

5. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Earlier we are told that love of God is repentance: “As soon as I love freely and love God, then I repent” (216).

6. All italics in quotations are in the original.

7. See my Modernity between Wagner and Nietzsche (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

8. Nietzsche recalls the tale in which King Midas asks Silenus, the companion of Dionysus (the god of tragedy), what is “the best and most desirable of all things for man.” Silenus answers: “What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.” The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 42.

9. Schopenhauer in reality holds that Jesus is the heir, not of Judaism, as based on what he views as the risible idea of life as creative, but of the life-denying tradition of Buddhism. He also distinguishes his own philosophical position from that of the ancient Greeks. See my Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible: From Kant to Schopenhauer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

10. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. and rev. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 216; see also 5, 57, 76, and 84.