Happyclappy Catastrophe

Tom made quite a lot of reference to tragic drama in the seminar yesterday. This is appropriate, since, in uses of the word before the end of the eighteenth century, ‘catastrophe’ had a specifically literary or rhetorical meaning. It derived from ancient theories of dramatic plot, and referred specifically to the third phase of a plot, of which the first was the protasis (the setting out of the situation), the second was the epitasis (the thickening or complication of the plot), and third was the catastrophe, the resolution or dénouement. This is outlined by Samuel Gott in 1650: ‘in an ingenious Poem, which is the Creature of Fancy, the chief excellency is the Plot, and the excellency of the Plot is the strange difficulty and intricacy of the Epitasis, or troublesome state of the Business, which is afterward beyond all expectation cleared up, and resolved into an happy Catastrophe’ - Samuel Gott, An Essay of the True Happines of Man (London: for Thomas Underhill, 1650), p. 237.

The word thus came, by transference and extension, to mean the inevitable end of a process – thus ‘Apostasie is the Catastrophe of Hypocrisie’, according to William Crashaw and Thomas Pierson, in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to William Perkins, A Cloud of Faithful Witnesses, Leading to the Heauenly Canaan, or, A Commentarie Upon the 11 Chapter to the Hebrewes…(London: for Leo Greene, 1607). It was also used to mean the climax of a disease.

This means that, although catastrophes were often violent, melancholy or tragic, they were not always so. Certainly, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word ‘catastrophe’ could frequently, as in the Gott example just quoted, signify a happy, fortunate, or just plain ridiculous outcome. Reginald Scot’s hilarious sending up of witch-mania, The Discovery of Witchcraft, describes a woman who convinced herself that she was a witch, partly because of a rumbling she thought was the devil coming for her soul. The revelation that the rumbling was the sound of a dog gnawing at a sheep is described by Scot as ‘a comicall catastrophe’ - Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft (London: R.C. for Giles Calvert, 1651), p. 46.

This archaic use of the word is wryly recalled in the final words of Samuel Beckett’s play Catastrophe, where the overbearing Director exclaims: 'There's our catastrophe. In the bag' - Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 300.

Members of the seminar who work their way through the 893 uses of the word returned by Early English Books Online - accessible to Birkbeck students from http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/elib/ --> Databases and Online Resources --> Arts and Humanities - may be able to come up with further interesting variations of the word.