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Domestic tragedy, conventionally associated with the sensibility of the emergent metropolitan
middle classes, has never been held in very high esteem by Marxian critics. In recent times,
many critics on the Left have tended to regard the whole genre of tragedy, with its supposedly
elitist sensibility and leanings toward an apocalyptic conception of history, in a rather dim light.
It was not always so, of course. Marx shared the enthusiasm of his age and class for classical
Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, and some of the greatest Marxist cultural critics of this
century, such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Raymond Williams, have written about
tragedy in quite positive terms.
Here, I want to look at three dramas, all of a tragic character or design, that deal with the
conflict in Northern Ireland: St. John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911), which can be
considered a domestic tragedy; Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge (1960), which, although set
in the more “masculine” space of the B...
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