How tragic was my tragedy? - Triumph vs. tragic

[catbuglah]

ORSON WELLES: I think one can say it about all dramatic writing that attempts to be tragic inside the framework of the melodrama. Ever since melodrama has existed, the tragic hero has a tendency to be a swine. Only the Greeks and the French classical writers were able to have heroes who were not bad men because they were tragic in the abstract. But as soon as you get mixed up with any kind of melodrama, the tragic character has to be a villain, one way or another, quite simply because a hero, in a melodrama, is nothing at all. A hero is insufferable except in a real tragedy. It is impossible to write a real tragedy for the general public; at least it has not been done since the Greeks or since the age of the classical French poetic drama. Shakespeare never wrote a pure tragedy; he couldn't. He wrote melodrama which had the stature of tragedy, but that did not stop them from having melodramatic stories. And since they are melodramas the heroes are villains. The pure heroes, the true heroes, like Brutus, are all bad parts, nobody wants to play them, nobody cares about them, nobody is interested in them. Brutus is a tremendous part, there are some wonderful speeches in it, but not one actor particularly desires to play him.