Spectacles of Horror: Approaching the Supernatural in Greek Tragedy

Abstract

Belief in the power of the supernatural world to affect the world of the living permeates Greek tragedy. Contrary to traditional accounts of ancient Greece as a forebearer to modern Western culture, an exploration into Greek supernatural beliefs shows that tragedy is radically non-rational, and non-modern. Its values are incongruous with the values of an empirically and globally based modern world that takes as orthodoxy the inherent realism of all things tangible. It is the radical difference between ancient Greek culture and the modern world that presents such a challenge to modern theatre directors who approach the production of Greek tragedy. While the secularized modern West dispatched with supernatural curiosities in the public sphere, tragedy finds its modern kindred in that realm to which those curiosities were banished but given new life: horror fiction. By employing the aesthetic elements of that genre to which the modern world consigned its fascination with the macabre, Greek tragedy, through a spectacle of horror centered on the existence and power of supernatural forces has the potential to challenge the social, ethical, and scientific assumptions of modern audiences. This dissertation will explore the relationship between Greek tragedy and modern horror by considering three objects of horror that guide the violent outcomes of the tragic plot: the Dead, the Divine, and the Other. An analysis of these objects of horror will first consider the role of these forces in ancient Greek culture as evidenced by the extant literary tradition of antiquity. Secondly, this dissertation will analyze exemplary modern productions of tragedy to consider how the aesthetic theories of horror provide a lens by which the modern theatre maker might approach the supernatural characteristics of tragedy. We will see that the parallels between tragedy and horror allow for the aesthetics of horror to provide a model in which the supernatural powers present in Greek tragedy may be effectively presented to a modern audience.