Tragedy: An Introduction

     Tragedy has its origins in the Greek dramas by the ancient Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, in 6th-5th C.BC. Essentially the spirit of this writing was that inevitable suffering overwhelms the characters, yet the characters maintain their dignity in the face of this suffering, and prove their greatness (and the capacity of human beings for greatness).

     Essence: unyielding spirit for the value and identity

I. Definition of tragedy

In the Poetics, Aristotle speaks of tragedy as

   '  ...an imitation of an action…concerning the fall of a man whose character is good (though not pre-eminently just or virtuous)… whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity but by some error or frailty… with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of these emotions."

 In “ Tragedy and Common Man” Arthur Miller states,  

    "From Orestes to Hamlet, King Lear to Macbeth, one may note that the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his “rightful” position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time. The struggle for personal identity, then, has been fundamental in the structure of tragedy. "

As Arthur Miller puts it, “tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly”, for the disaster as well as the nobility of the tragic hero is produced in his unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what conceives to be challenge to his dignity, his images of his rightful status.

 Lu Xun says, 

      "Tragedy is to show how the beauty is destroyed."