Between Athens and Jerusalem: King Lear and the Morality of Tragedy

Is classical tragedy contingent upon a Greco-Roman sense of morality? Or can tragedy exist within a Judeo-Christian universe as well? Literary critic Northrop Frye’s theory of high-mimetic tragedy inherits distinctions that Aristotle draws between tragedy and comedy in the Poetics. As a brief philological excursion will demonstrate, the binary distinctions upon which Aristotle builds his tragic structure are inherently entangled with notions of a noble aristocracy, what Friedrich Nietzsche would call a master morality. With the introduction of Judeo-Christian morality— a framework that inverts the master morality latent in Aristotle’s system— the tragic structure breaks down. As demonstrated in King Lear, when these two antithetical notions of morality are present within the same text, the binary oppositions that underlie the tragic structure collapse, undermining the genre distinctions that separate tragedy from comedy. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, introduces his theory of modes by recalling a passage in the Poetics in which Aristotle uses a character’s elevation relative to the audience as criteria for distinguishing between types of poetry. The passage Frye seems to be recalling is as follows: ...since those who imitate choose as objects of imitation men in action and since those in action must be either good [spoudaios] or bad [phaulos] characters (inasmuch as character almost always falls into one of these two categories owing to the fact that distinctions in human character are all derived from the distinction between badness and goodness), they portray them as either better, or worse, or such as we are. 2