The Death of Tragedy by George Steiner

How hard is The Death of Tragedy to read?

The Death of Tragedy scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 72 out of 100

Steiner moves fluently between English, French, German, and Greek, quoting Racine, Marlowe, and Goethe in the original without translation. Specialized terms from classical scholarship and theatre criticism appear throughout — dénouement, parabasis, Aeschylean, daemonic — alongside proper names spanning three millennia of European drama. Literary vocabulary consistently in the 'High' band, comparable to Moby-Dick's specialized register.

Sentence structure: 62 out of 100

Steiner's sentences are formal and periodic, with multiple subordinate clauses layered toward a conclusion, but they do not approach Jamesian or Proustian extremes. Paragraphs sustain long trains of reasoning without losing the thread. The prose demands attention but rewards re-reading rather than requiring it.

Abstraction: 80 out of 100

The entire book operates at a philosophical register: Steiner argues about the theological conditions for tragic form, the relationship between Christian redemption and dramatic closure, why the Romantic movement produced only 'near-tragedy.' Concrete examples — specific plays, specific passages — serve as evidence for abstract claims rather than as objects in themselves. The level of sustained philosophical argument is comparable to Brothers Karamazov's interpolated discourse.

Information density: 78 out of 100

Each chapter surveys an entire period of dramatic history, introduces multiple playwrights, situates individual plays within Steiner's evolving argument, and advances several distinct claims simultaneously. A single page might move from Sophocles to Racine to Wagner to Ibsen. The accumulation is relentless; nothing can be skimmed. Comparable in density to 2666's historical layering.

Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100

This is literary criticism, not fiction. Steiner states his arguments directly, announces his theses at the opening of chapters, and summarizes conclusions explicitly. Readers are told what to think. The discursive mode is antithetical to narrative indirection.

Symbolic density: 18 out of 100

Steiner analyzes symbols in the plays he discusses, but his own critical prose is analytical rather than symbolic. There is no second layer of meaning beneath the argument. His imagery is illustrative, not structural.

Ironic distance: 22 out of 100

Steiner writes with polemical conviction and occasional wit, but maintains no sustained ironic gap between stated position and actual meaning. His provocation is direct: he thinks tragedy is dead and says so. The tone is confident, sometimes elegiac, but never ironic in the Nabokovian or Wildean sense.

Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100

The book builds toward and arrives at a clear thesis: the conditions for tragic drama — a shared mythological framework, a theology that permits absolute damnation — no longer exist in modernity, and tragedy as a form is finished. The conclusion is stated, not withheld. The argument has the closural structure of the essay tradition.

Structural complexity: 22 out of 100

Organized chronologically, moving from Greek tragedy through French classical drama, Elizabethan theatre, Romanticism, and modern drama to Brecht. Chapter divisions are clear, the argument builds sequentially. No formal experimentation, no multiple timelines, no unreliable narrators.

How The Death of Tragedy is regarded

The Death of Tragedy holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

George Steiner