| Summary: | It is commonly assumed that Daniel Defoe, as a Dissenting writer, was not familiar with the renewed interest in the poetic discussions of tragedy that flourished in early-18th century Britain. However, his strategic use of the term “tragedy” at the end of his last novel Roxana (1724), to account for and define the nature of his novel’s dénouement, could well be indebted to The Complete Art of Poetry (1718) by rival critic and fellow-novelist Charles Gildon (1665?-1724), a writer whom Defoe had read and quoted on other occasions during the 1720s. By resorting to the term tragedy to refer to the catastrophe of his last novel, Defoe could well be paying homage to the Euripidean figure of Medea, a character who had recently been revived on the Georgian stage and seems to have shaped Roxana’s ambivalent feelings for her progeny. Roxana’s participation in the probable assassination of her own daughter likens her to a modern Medea, a familiar figure for many of Defoe’s and Gildon’s readers. In that perspective, Medea, who is presented in Gildon’s treatise as the very epitome of tragic heroism, is a much more likely model than the commonly assumed paradigms of tragedies of damnation exemplified by Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592) or Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c. 1606), traditionally presented since the Romantic period and throughout the second half of the 20th century, as Roxana’s tragic models.
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