protagonist

protagonist

1. This is a good example of what Fowler (1926) called a ‘popularized technicality’, i.e. a term used in a special domain (in this case, ancient Greek drama) and extended into general use with consequent (and controversial) shifts in meaning. In its literary use, protagonist meant ‘first actor’, i.e. the chief character in a play (often also the name by which the play is known, as with Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Euripides' Orestes). The protagonist was accompanied by a deuteragonist and sometimes by a tritagonist, representing dramatic roles of second and third importance.

2. One consequence of all this for the use of protagonist in English is that there is strictly only one protagonist in any given situation. Another is that to speak of a chief protagonist or leading protagonist is tautological, since a protagonist is by definition the leading personage. The second point is cogent, but the first has little validity outside the context of ancient drama, beyond which the word had already progressed by the 19c:

• If social equity is not a chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of the most…execrable of causes —J. Morley, 1877.

The objection sometimes heard, that only one person can truly be ‘first’, belongs to the realm of philosophy, not language. We may therefore refer to the protagonists, the chief characters in a piece of literary fiction or the leading figures in various walks of life, as well as to the protagonist:

• The two protagonists, the cuckoo and the nightingale, present a series of antithetical statements about the power of love, in which the cuckoo finally gains the edge —Dictionary of National Biography, 1993

• By then most of the original protagonists had gone their separate ways and the Salon itself was divided and no longer held in much esteem —Oxford Companion to Western Art, 2001.

3. A further development in meaning represents a more serious departure from the word's origins, and is illustrated by these examples:

• There is a tendency of protagonists of the computational theory of mind to boast that they are restoring the Aristotelian emphasis on cognition and thought —R. Tallis et al., 1991

• These may be worthy views but they are not those of a true protagonist of the arts-Scotland on Sunday, 2003.

Here, protagonist (perhaps influenced by the coincidence of the word's form with the common prefix pro-) has come to mean ‘advocate or proponent’ rather than ‘leading figure’ (one may involve the other, but we are concerned here with meaning and not implication). In this meaning, alternatives such as advocate, proponent, or supporter are normally preferable, although it is true that they do not convey quite the same sense of innovation and personal involvement. Although this sense of protagonist is fast becoming established, a caveat should be entered that it is still regarded by many as a serious error.