Name: アリストテレスからの悲劇の教訓クラッシュ・コース・シアター#3 (Tragedy Lessons from Aristotle: Crash Course Theater #3)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:13:29.000Z
Duration: 12 min 30 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course
Theater, and today is going to be a tragedy.

Which is a lot like a regular tragedy, only
older and with more stuffed grape leaves.

We'll be exploring Aristotle's theories
on this artform, written more than a century

Then we'll apply them retrospectively to
the only surviving tragic trilogy we have,

Get ready for some husband-killing, some mother-killing
and, maybe unsurprisingly, the invention of

Also believes in life after love, though!

He was born in 384 BCE and lived in Greece
and Macedonia.

He spent many years studying with Plato, a
philosopher who wasn't a big fan of drama

Plato wrote that poets encourage a false vision
of reality and should all be excluded from

Luckily for us his pupil Aristotle was more
open-minded.

In 335 BCE, a little while after he'd finished
tutoring Alexander the Great, Aristotle sat

down to write The Poetics, the first substantial
work of literary criticism.

Originally The Poetics was in two parts, a
section on tragedy and a section on comedy,

Aristotle was writing 200 years after the
City Dionysia really got going and 150 years

after the beginning of the golden age of Greek
drama.

So the Poetics isn't really about analyzing
contemporary work, it's about looking at

the work that came before Aristotle, deciding
what's great about it, and providing a handbook

Aristotle was trying to stick it to Plato
by proving poetry (and theatre) could be useful

He was a big fan of Sophocles and the rules
Aristotle set out apply most closely to Sophocles's

own “Oedipus Rex”, which you might remember
from Crash Course Literature.

Club foot, murder, incest, stabbing out the
eyes—it's memorable stuff.

But Aristotle's theories apply, in many
ways, to all of the works of Greek tragedy.

And often, we can gain a lot of insight through
how ancient plays do or do not tick the boxes

And in fact, Aristotle's theories continue
to influence how we write and think about

First off, the tragedy portion of Aristotle's
Poetics considers several forms of poetry,

including the tragedy, and the epic, which
is different in that it's mostly descriptive,

It tells rather than shows, like the dithyrambs
we discussed last episode.

We're here to talk tragedy which, Aristotle
defines as:

“An imitation of an action that is serious,
complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language

embellished with each kind of artistic ornament,
the several kinds being found in separate

parts of the play; in the form of action,
not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting

the proper purgation of these emotions.”

So, Okay, a lot of this language is ambiguous,
but there are some conclusions we can draw.

We're gonna go bit by bit: What does serious
mean?

Well, there probably aren't a lot of satyrs
and phalluses.

Each play in a tragedy has to stand independent
from other works in its trilogy.

That's lucky for us because as we discussed
last time, invading .hordes have a bad habit

of burning libraries and we've lost a lot
of plays.

That's trickier, but if you read Greek tragedies
you'll notice they deal with legendary heroes

or royal families, characters whose lives
will have a sizable impact.

Also their difficulties are not minor—these
are stories about murder, vengeance, betrayal…

By language embellished, Aristotle means not
only poetry, but also song.

In the form of action, not of narrative, means
showing rather than telling.

And through pity and fear effecting the proper
purgation of those emotions - that's catharsis,

and as we suggested last episode, it's kept
scholars fearful and pitious for centuries.

We offered one explanation last time, that
plays help make people better citizens by

purging them of emotions unhelpful to the
city-state—you have a good cry at the theater

so that you're not crying when it comes
to making political decisions.

But scholars have argued that this catharsis
is actually supposed to happen for the characters

onstage; there's been a lot of debate about
whether the goal of catharsis is an emotional

purgation or an intellectual clarification.

Is catharsis supposed to awaken your emotions,
or trigger some deeply rational thoughts?

Aristotle also said tragedy is composed of
six parts: Plot, Character, Diction, Thought,

They're important pretty much in that order,
although he says that song matters more than

You don't want too much spectacle he says,
because that's cheap and tragedy should

be enjoyable, but not, like, too enjoyable.

And Aristotle argues that even though it's
characters we care about, it's actually

the plot—the tragic action—that's most
important.

You could have a character just like Oedipus,
for instance, who doesn't kill his father

or marry his mother, but … well, that's
not really much of a tragedy.

Aristotle believes that in order for a tragedy
to really work, it needs to focus on a mostly

good character who–through the tragic action–is
then brought low.

If you have a mostly bad character brought
low: Big whoop, they had it coming, no tragedy.

Same goes for a mostly good character who
stays good: No pity, no fear, no catharsis.

An unimpeachably good character brought low
doesn't work either, because the tragic

action has to be their fault, at least a little.

Aristotle writes that the ideal is to have
a mostly noble and illustrious character “whose

misfortune is brought about not by vice or
depravity, but by some error or frailty.”

The word for frailty in Greek is hamartia.

It's a term that comes from archery and
it means missing the mark.