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What is Shakespeare's concept of tragedy?
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Shakespeare's concept of tragedy follows Aristotelian principles, emphasizing a tragic hero who evokes pity and terror due to a critical mistake. His major tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth—illustrate this through flawed heroes whose actions reflect universal human weaknesses. Particularly in Macbeth, Shakespeare highlights existential themes, portraying characters as victims of uncontrollable forces in a chaotic universe. This blend of classical and existential aspects defines his unique tragic vision.
Shakespeare's conception of tragedy illustrates the durability and timelessness of principles that date back to antiquity and were enunciated in Aristotle's Poetics. Tragedy must evoke pity and terror in the spectator, and the tragic hero should be "a great man who has made a mistake." The four major tragedies of Shakespeare—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth—all illustrate these principles, though in different ways.
I would choose Macbeth, of those four, as the play most clearly and simply exemplifying not only the Aristotelian idea of tragedy but also another element possibly specific to Shakespeare and typical of his more "modern" orientation. Macbeth, as his standing with the king and with the nobility at the start of the play reveals, is a man who has demonstrated heroic qualities as a leader. But he has the potential for self-destruction, because he cannot resist the urge to kill....
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The moment he hears the prophecy of the witches, he starts in fear, for he senses that this urge already exists within himself, and, though he knows it's morally wrong, he does not have the ability to overcome it. The witches themselves and Lady Macbeth's urgings are, I would argue, an accessory, a mere adjunct to the fatal flaw in Macbeth's nature. To kill once is his "mistake," and once he has killed Duncan, he has no choice but to kill again to protect himself. It is a mistake on a gigantic scale, just as with the tragic heroes of Greek drama, such as Oedipus. Therefore, the requirement of tragedy is that the hero's flaw is something that exists on a higher level than that of ordinary life. The hero is a grand-scale representative of the universal weaknesses of human beings overall.
Macbeth's actions would not fulfill the requirements of tragedy if we did not react with pity and terror to his plight. Shakespeare depicts a man who seemingly kills ruthlessly and for no definite reason, but we, as readers and audiences, somehow empathize with him, largely because of the immense regret Macbeth expresses throughout the play.
At the same time, there is an element in Shakespeare's tragic sense that anticipates the existentialism of the twentieth century. When Macbeth says that life is
A tale told by an idiot, full of
Sound and fury, signifying nothing . . .
we see a man at sea in a hostile or meaningless universe, who is more a victim of forces he can neither understand nor control than a man who has committed evil. This same depiction of man as helpless before the immense irrationality of the world is also found in Othello,King Lear, and Hamlet.