The Tragedy of the Agamemnons has touched generations of audiences from antiquity to the present day, with authors such as the fifth century BC Aeschylus, to the twentieth century AD Eugene O’Neill, choosing to present their enigmatic story. This story, along with all other tragedies cannot be described as being ‘enjoyable’, and yet, time and again, authors will write tragedies, and millions will watch and read them. The appeal of Tragedy must therefore lie elsewhere than in its entertainment value, and its analeptic nature can perhaps be partway explained by the fact that tragedies are set in the past and that their events are beyond the reach of our endeavours.
The consolation that tragedies are set in the past can be appreciated on two levels. Firstly, an audience need not fear the dissatisfaction of an incomplete story. Since the tragedy was set in the past, the action must therefore be complete, and the absoluteness associated with finalized action produces an immense relief that the audience knows will be accomplished by the end of the tragedy.
Secondly, tragic paradigms were created in the antique, and therefore distant past. This creates the consolation that events are beyond our personal knowledge, and are therefore beyond being dangerous to us. The chronological lacuna has also been used as a means of consoling certain movements criticised by authors through their plays. For example, Anouilh’s Antigone was implicitly against the Nazi tyranny of Occupied France, and similarly, Atol Fugard’s, The Island, protested against apartheid in South Africa. On the surface, these plays narrated the story of a fifth century BC Athenian girl, and were therefore remote from the tensions contemporary with their original productions. Comforted by the seemingly anachronistic appearance of the plays, the oppressors therefore allowed the public performance of plays that contained themes potentially subversive to their rule.
Nevertheless, Tragedy cannot be dismissed so easily, by saying that it is consoling solely because its events are beyond our personal knowledge. All Greek tragedies were in fact written for an audience who viewed its mythology as occurring in their recent history. Modern tragedies are similarly written in contemporary, or near-contemporary settings, as can be seen by Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, which is set in the years 1865 – 1866. Although knowledge of this time period is not personally available to an early twenty-first century audience, it was, nevertheless, available to its original audience and the author included many autobiographical references to the play.
Furthermore, it is obvious that the themes of the Orestia are not remote from modern sensibilities and experience. Since the most consoling factor about Tragedy is thus not a sense of security afforded to the events by their historical setting, there must therefore be another ‘consoling’ factor that reaches out from fifth century Athens, past an industrial revolution, and in the case of the West, the advent of Christianity, to touch an audience separated from the original tragedy by almost three millennia.
