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By Root 5329 0

five-stage cycle of Tragedy, in short, the play picks up the story at the Frustration Stage. The first two acts show the hero - rather like Anna Karenina at a similar stage in her story, when she attempts a last reconciliation with her husband - making a final effort to return to his Roman self, by going back to Rome to join Octavius and Lepidus in dealing with Pompey. To emphasise his determination to break with the past and make a fresh start, Antony even marries Octavius's sister. But, just as the unresolved lure of Vronsky had proved too much for Anna, the fatal lure of Cleopatra is too strong. Antony returns to Egypt, throwing him into final opposition to Octavius. There follows the battle of Actium, the beginning of the Nightmare Stage, when just as Antony thinks victory is in his grasp, Cleopatra leads her ships into headlong retreat, giving the day to Octavius. Octavius pursues Antony to Egypt and there is a second battle, in which again Antony sees victory torn from his grasp by the flight of Cleopatra's forces. Thirdly Antony falls out with Cleopatra, berating her for her treachery. She sends him word that she has killed herself, and in despair he commits suicide. Finally, when she sees what she has brought about by her foolish `feminine' wiles, Cleopatra commits suicide herself.

Don Giovanni

Another familiar tragic story we pick up at the Frustration Stage is that of Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, derived via the version by Moliere from the original `Don Juan' play, the Burlador de Sevilla, by the pseudonymous `Tirso de Molina'. Don Giovanni's reckless career as an insatiable and heartless seducer has obviously begun long before the story opens. Indeed, when Don Giovanni's servant Leporello recites a catalogue of his master's conquests (including the `1003' in Spain alone), it is clear just how long the Dream Stage of the adventure, when the hero was `getting away with it', must have lasted. But as the opera begins, Don Giovanni is for the first time beginning to ran into serious trouble. He is embarking on a sequence of events which will first drive him into a mounting frenzy of frustration and ultimately destroy him. In the opening scene we see his latest attempted conquest, Donna Anna (who is engaged to Don Ottavio) struggling to get away from him. Her father, the Commendatore, intervenes and Don Giovanni kills him: the fatal `dark act' which is going to be his downfall. From then on the whole story shows the hero getting enmeshed in an ever-tightening web of frustration, as he is driven on by his fatal weakness and only succeeds in arousing around him an ever-growing army of opponents. He attempts to seduce a woman in disguise, only to find to their mutual horror that she is one of his former conquests, Donna Elvira, whom he had cruelly thrown aside. He attempts to seduce the pretty young peasant girl Zerlina, and not only is frustrated by the intervention of Donna Elvira but also arouses the vengeful wrath of Zerlina's betrothed, Masetto. He now has on his trail both Masetto and Donna Anna's betrothed, Don Ottavio. He even falls out for a time with the only person who has hitherto always remained faithful to him, Leporello. Don Giovanni makes a last desperate attempt to seduce Donna Elvira's maid and is again frustrated. Everyone is now set against him, in a typical Nightmare Stage pursuit. And it is at this moment that, having fled into a graveyard, Don Giovanni finds himself confronted with the grim statue of the Commendatore, who seems, as in some nightmarish hallucination, to be addressing him. Mockingly he invites the statue to dinner and is horrified to hear it accept. Finally when he is sitting down to his supper table, the statue enters. After a terrifying exchange, the fires of hell blaze up in the darkness and the ghostly statue of his victim carries Don Giovanni off to his doom.

The Devils

We end this chapter by looking at a story which presents a subtle variation on the basic shape of the tragic plot, not least because it mixes together both the forms of the plot we have been looking