it is the result of his choices, not the result of fate. He chooses to murder the king in order to usurp the king's role—he was not fated to do so—and this action leads to his ruin. By the Elizabethan era, people preferred to believe that they had control over their lives rather than believe that something arbitrary—like fate—was directing their actions.

William Shakespeare certainly took some of his ideas about what made a tragic hero from the Greeks before him, but he also added his own spin. The Greeks believed humans were ruled by fate, and this is highly evident in Greek mythology. In many myths, the characters consulted oracles, and were told what their fate would be. The rest of the story was often spent trying to change that fate, with no real hope of doing so. A perfect example is the myth "Oedipus Rex," where, out of ignorance of his own birth, Oedipus is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother.  Oedipus leaves the couple he believes are his parents to change this terrible destiny, much later discovering they were actually his adoptive parents, and the story ends just as fate predicted.

Shakespeare's tragic heroes, however, are depicted as individuals responsible for their own destiny. Decisions they personally make lead to their downfall. Othello, for instance, misjudges several situations, and though evil forces abound, it is his own jealousy that causes his demise. To sum up, the Greek's vision was one of theo-centrism (the gods were at the center and controlled everything), where the Elizabethans of Shakespeare's time believed the individual's actions were primary.

In Greek tragedy, a hero is carefully defined – falling from a high place, tragic flaw, catharsis, etc. – as defined and illustrated by Aristotle in The Poetics.  By Elizabethan times the term “tragedy” had become somewhat looser, describing a genre in which persons suffered various inequities (some of which – Macbeth and King Lear, for example – still fulfilled the Greek definition, and some which do not – Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida, for example).  These tragic heroes were more dramatic constructions to tell a story on the stage, rather than a quasi-religious icon of a philosophical world view.  Elizabethan heroes were more complex in their motives, in their psychological make-up, in their social standing, part of the "commodity" of theatre, rather than part of the ritual to honor Dionysus, as Greek tragedies were. Finally, the very term "hero" becomes rather ambiguous in Elizabethan drama, because whole societies were not necessarily affected, as kingdoms were in Greek tragedy.