Just wondering about how the Greeks interpreted tragedy. I've been reading that they used it as a sort of buffer against sadness and sometimes it appears that tragedy and comedy were very similar to them
You may have, if it was poorly written (Sophocles's Oedipus Rex was not the only version of the play, just the most famous and best of the surviving plays), or you had a cruel and unusual sense of humor. Socrates probably laughed. But you weren't supposed to. Tragedy and Comedy had complementary philosophic values, but the Greeks liked to keep genres separate, and did not favor the mixing of styles. True "tragicomedies" did not come about until the Italian Renaissance.
For what it's worth, in Poetics, Aristotle covers exactly what a Tragedy is supposed to make you feel, and how badly-written ones fail:
"It follows plainly, in the first place, that the change of fortune presented must not be the spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity: for this moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us. Nor, again, that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity: for nothing can be more alien to the spirit of Tragedy; it possesses no single tragic quality; it neither satisfies the moral sense nor calls forth pity or fear. Nor, again, should the downfall of the utter villain be exhibited. A plot of this kind would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear; for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. There remains, then, the character between these two extremes- that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous- a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families."
To say they used tragedy as a "buffer" against sadness is a bit misleading. If anything, we might say that they used it to get all of their sadness out in a safe place.
Aristotle, writing some decades after the Golden Age of Greek tragedy, wrote in his Poetics that the goal of tragedy was katharsis, or the "purgation" of pity and fear in the audience. In Aristotle's analysis, tragedy had to excite pity and fear within the viewer so that those emotions could be fully felt and therefore purged from the body. Therefore, it's not very likely that the Oedipal revelation would be cause for humor.
Furthermore, most in the audience would likely have known the Oedipus myth already. The goal was not to surprise the audience with Oedipus's reversal of fortune (peripiteia), but to get them to pity and fear Oedipus as the reversal happens.
I would also dispute the idea that tragedy and comedy were particularly similar genres (with one important qualification below). It sounds like something a scholar would write to make a particular point which might be narrowly valid but problematic if widely applied. Tragedies were performed in festivals specifically set aside for that purpose (the City Dionysia is the best known), and had a specific form. Comedies were not (as best we know) in the City Dionysia and were treated as a totally separate genre by Aristotle (though his lectures on comedy have been lost).
One qualification, though: At the City Dionysia, playwrights didn't just submit a single play for the competition. They submitted three related plays, or a trilogy. We only have one complete trilogy that has survived, the Oresteia by Aeschylus. Each play was performed on a separate day. The fourth day of the festival was dedicated to the satyr play, which was a burlesque play that replaced the traditional chorus with a group of satyrs - half-man/half-goat demigod known for their drunkenness and lechery. The satyr plays would burlesque known stories by adding the comedy of the satyrs. For a long time it was thought that our word "satire" descended from the satyr play, and while this etymology is largely out of favor, the connection is instructive. Satyr plays took serious old stories and made them funny, as a kind of safety valve for the doom and gloom of the tragedies that filled the rest of the festival.
The satyr plays could be why someone would make the argument that comedy and tragedy are very similar, but I wouldn't phrase it that way - the Greeks were just too careful about matters of genre, and the satyr plays were themselves a totally separate genre from the comedies of Aristophanes and the like. However, I think you could safely say that the Greeks saw laughter and lightness as a part of life that was equally necessary as katharsis.
hi! it might be worth x-posting this to /r/AskLiteraryStudies
You would have known the plot of the play beforehand. The grand majority of tragedy dealt with myths, and the Greeks already knew how those stories went. Of course, there were different versions of myths, and tragedians were expected to twist things a little bit, but something so vital to the core of the story would have been already clear to the audience. If there were competing versions of the myth, the playwright would likely clarify which plotline he intended to follow (before the tragic competition began, the playwrights and their choruses presented the topics of their plays). For instance, in the myth of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, Aeschylus has Clytemnestra kill Agamemnon herself, for personal reasons, whereas earlier versions of the myth have Agamemnon killed by Aegisthus, Clytemnestra's lover, with her encouragement. That small change is acceptable, because the main plot of Agamemnon is the death of Agamemnon, in which his wife was complicit in some way. Something as fundamental to Oedipus as Jocasta being his mother would not be changed by the playwright, as it's a key to the plot.
The Greek audience viewed tragedy much differently than we do today. Today, our sense of dramatic tension- the suspense that keeps us reading or watching- is that we don't know how the story will end (even when it's obvious that something will happen, like the hero wins the karate competition and gets the girl, or James Bond succeeds against all odds), we still wonder how that resolution is going to come about. The mystery keeps us paying attention.
For most tragedies, the Greeks already knew how it was going to happen. They already knew the ending, and so it wasn't a mystery to keep them watching. The tension for the Greeks was in the conflict of emotions created. Tragedy would intend to cause you to feel emotions that opposed each other- pity and fear, sympathy and hatred, frustration and relief. Dramatic irony, where the audience knows something the characters don't, played a huge part in lots of tragedies, because it was inherent in the staging of well known stories, and was thus easy to manipulate to create emotional conflict. That's why you get these long ass speeches by the characters. As modern readers, we want them to get the hell on with the plot, but those speeches were intended to create some of those conflicting emotions. Really, the plot of the tragedy was almost incidental, a framework in which to create those conflicting emotions. Different playwrights might interpret the same myth different ways, to create different emotional conflicts. That's why the 'climax' of the tragedy, or the release of dramatic tension, happens a lot earlier than the climax of a modern story. For us, the climax solves all the plot mysteries, so it had better be the end of the play. For Greek tragedy, the climax was the coming together of the emotions, where everything comes to a head and the two conflicting emotions are put into direct combat with each other. The characters become aware of the true nature of whatever is going on (known as a recognition moment), which removes the dramatic irony. Out of this comes, if not one emotion, at least a resolution of emotions. The second half of the tragedy shows the final outcome, the result of this clash. Some tragedies didn't even need a real plot, because the focus was, after all, the emotions (see Trojan Women or Prometheus).
Of course, tragedies that play with this formula, but that's the general idea.
For instance, in Medea, it's made very clear early on exactly what Medea intends to do. There's no mystery about the fact that she's planning on killing her children to get back at her husband. However, the playwright goes to great effort to engender sympathy for her situation, even while she lies and deceives and murders people. We would expect some sort of final say from the story about how to feel about the character. We expect that resolution. Even with gray characters, we still expect some final say (oh, gollum wasn't really evil- he did a lot of bad things, he was corrupted by the ring, or we should pity that guy for his circumstances but firmly condemn his actions). In Greek tragedy, we get no such final resolution on Medea's character.
In Bacchae, we mock and hate Pentheus, but then feel sorry for him. We root for and gloat about Dionysus' power and success, but then feel horrified at his utter lack of human emotions. Even though each member of the audience would have felt something different, and it's a bit banal to generalize this way, the conflict of emotions was the source of tension in Greek tragedy.
In Oedipus, the tension comes from the dramatic irony, and our pity for Oedipus' fate, as well as the dread of anticipation of his moment of realization. We also feel frustration at Oedipus' dismissal of Jocasta's and Teirisias' advice, but at the same time know that he isn't going to take it and is, in fact, perfectly sensible in not taking it, considering the knowledge that he does have. You can recognize the horrible situation that's going on, so when the characters finally recognize it too, you feel a sort of relief. You probably don't laugh unless the actor screwed up and said something funny.