logo

tragedy

What is Tragedy? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Tragedy Definition

A tragedy (TRA-jud-dee) is a genre of drama focusing on stories of human suffering. The drama typically consists of a human flaw or weakness in one of the work’s central characters, which then triggers a devastating event or series of events for those in that character’s orbit.

Tragedies are most commonly associated with stage plays, but any fictional work—and many nonfiction works too—can include tragic elements. Audiences respond to tragedies for two main reasons: the comfort one can draw from commiserating with another’s suffering and the pleasure one can find, however perverse it may sound, watching another’s struggles. The genre has a long history in the theatrical world, with its roots in the classic tragedies of antiquity.

The word tragedy comes from the Greek tragodia, meaning “a formal play or poem with a sad ending.”

The History of the Tragedy

The Athenian tragedies of ancient Greece are the oldest surviving form of the genre. Greek tragedy flourished during the 5th century BCE, when merrymakers staged them every spring as part of a religious festival celebrating Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. During the celebration, three playwrights competed for the title of champion by each presenting three self-written tragedies and one satyr play, a Greek type of tragicomedy. Only one tragedy cycle from these events has survived: Aeschylus’s the Oresteia. Aeschylus would emerge as one of the preeminent playwrights of the era, along with Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, Antigone) and Euripides (Medea, The Bacchae).

When the Roman Republic conquered many areas of Greece, it spread Greece’s particular form of theater—namely, tragedies—across the continent to a larger audience and even more widespread popularity. Roman writers started creating tragedies of their own by the 3rd century BCE. Though extremely celebrated and immensely popular in its day, no Roman tragedy survived into the modern era. Popular tragedians of ancient Rome included Lucius Accius (Decius, Brutus), Quintus Ennius, and Marcus Pacuvius. Seneca the Younger lived several decades after these playwrights, and he would go on to become perhaps the foremost tragedian of ancient Rome. Several of his works, including Oedipus and Phaedra, survive.

A few centuries later, in his landmark treatise Poetics, Greek philosopher Aristotle defined tragedy as a specific art form. He characterized Greek tragedy as being a complete work, consisting of an introduction, middle, and end, with a powerful plot, formal and poetic language, and depictions of tragic scenarios that draw pity from the audience. The ultimate goal, Aristotle said, is for the audience’s experience of pity to lead to an emotional catharsis. So, in the end, tragedy was intended as a sort of purgative experience. Aristotle is just one of many philosophers who, through the ages, has defined tragedy in their own terms. Others include Plato, Saint Augustine, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Camus.

Tragedies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Tragedies for the stage fell out of favor by the Middle Ages, when the Church assumed dominance of much of Western art. Not surprisingly, this era produced plays primarily about moral dilemmas and religious teachings. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that writers rediscovered the playwrights of antiquity and the tragedies they wrote. Poets, scholars, and other writers translated these plays for the contemporary audience.

The Renaissance in England ushered in a new era in stage tragedies. There were three types of tragedies generally written and performed during this period: tragedies of circumstance, which involved unfortunate events happening to characters through no fault of their own, such as being born into an ill-fated but noble family; tragedies of miscalculation, in which a character commits an error—sometimes seemingly small—that has major and catastrophic consequences; and revenge plays, in which a character seeks to avenge a suffering by instigating more suffering. William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Titus Andronicus), Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great), and John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil) all wrote world-famous tragedies during this period.

French dramatist Pierre Corneille continued this tradition into the 17th century, adding his own interpretation of the genre. He felt that all tragedies should have honorable, admirable characters, which would further add to the misfortune of their downfall; center stories about royalty or government, like wars, marriages, and political assassinations; and avoid rewarding evil behavior with redemption. Corneille’s best-known tragedy is Le Cid. Jean Racine was an equally famous tragedian of the time, producing works like Phèdre and Andromaque.

Tragedies in the Modern Era

Despite Aristotle, Corneille, and the Renaissance playwrights declaring formal rules about tragedy, as time went on, the parameters around the genre started to soften. Playwrights felt more emboldened to break the bonds of traditional form, incorporating elements of tragedy into comedies and vice versa, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and continuing to the present day.

American playwright Arthur Miller argued that domestic environments provided the perfect setting for modern tragedies, and common folk the ideal heroes and heroines. Other differences that gradually distinguished modern from classical tragedies included the incorporation of subplots instead of a laser focus on one primary character’s tragedy and a greater emphasis placed on entertainment, rather than imparting a moral lesson or initiating a catharsis for the audience.

Modern tragedies possess more nuance than those of the ancient and classical worlds; rarely are all or most of the principal characters dead by the end of a modern tragedy, as is the case in most older tragic works. Modern playwrights interpret tragedy to mean any number of unfortunate circumstances that might befall a character and lead to suffering and profound ruin: the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a financial downturn, mental illness, and, of course, death, to name just a few.

Using this more inclusive definition of tragedy, many modern plays meet the benchmarks of the genre. Popular examples include Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller, Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet, Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire, and Sweat by Lynn Nottage.

The Elements of a Tragedy

A play can include any number of elements that identify it as a tragedy, the most common being a tragic hero, a tragic flaw, and catharsis.

Tragic Hero

A tragic hero is a central character whose choices or weaknesses lead to their downfall. They initially possess some admirable or valiant quality, such as bravery, compassion, or decency. But, their bad judgement or moral failings, however momentary, result in a failure that has disastrous consequences.

Tragic heroes include Oedipus in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, whose hubris causes him to fulfill the unthinkable prophecy of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and gouging out his own eyes; and Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, who falls short of his own high standards as a husband and father and kills himself so his family will have the financial support provided by the insurance money.

Tragic Flaw

A tragic flaw is a character trait that triggers the tragic hero’s defeat. The flaw might be a decision or mistake the character makes or a limitation they possess. For instance, the title character in Macbeth has the tragic flaw of unbridled ambition, which drives him to join forces with his power-hungry wife and try to murder the king.

In Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, it’s Blanche DuBois’s emotional fragility—mixed with hearty doses of mental illness and alcoholism—that is her tragic flaw. It shatters under the bullying of her brother-in-law, bringing about her undoing and her ultimate commitment to a mental institution.

Catharsis

Catharsis is a purging or purification of emotions. In Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, the audience undergoes a sort of catharsis, but so do the characters. Even if the characters don’t survive or experience any type of redemption in the end, the process of catharsis can, emotionally or spiritually speaking, cleanse them of their pain.

Take Othello in Shakespeare’s play of the same name. His suicide at the play’s end, after he realizes that Iago’s deception has led Othello to kill his wife Desdemona, is a catharsis of sorts. The suicide doesn’t absolve Othello of culpability, but it does absolve him of his pain.

The Function of a Tragedy

Writers use tragedy to examine how behavior, choices, states of mind, and factors beyond one’s control can damage the psyche and cause suffering, both in and beyond oneself. Suffering is one of the few universal human experiences we all share, and understanding it helps us better understand one another. This naturally leads to empathy, and it can also comfort an audience and make them feel less alone.

Clearly, most people don’t like to watch other human beings suffer in real life, but in the context of a fictional tragedy, bearing witness to suffering can be a transformative experience. It can illustrate the depths of another’s pain; serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when one makes certain choices or engages certain triggers; and show the natural consequences of cause and effect.

Tragedies in Other Types of Literature

Novels, short stories, and nonfiction works like memoirs and biographies can also have tragic elements similar to those found in the genre of plays. The novel The Fault in Our Stars is a romantic tragedy about two terminally ill teenagers who fall in love. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara has been called an epic modern tragedy, chronicling the lives of four friends from college to middle age. “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, is a tragic short story about a small town where, every year, the townspeople draw a random citizen’s name and stone them to death.

Biographical works can document tragic events in the subject’s life. For instance, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion delves into her grief surrounding the sudden death of her husband and its devastating impact on her life. In Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir, Lorna Luft recounts the tragic life and death of her famous mother, Judy Garland.

Also a type of stage production, operas are known for their tragic plots. For example, the title heroine in Carmen, through her seductive ways, precipitates the ruin of naïve soldier Don Jose. While we tend to think of stage musicals as lighthearted and comedic productions, some do venture into tragic territory, such as Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Les Misérables, and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Sunset Boulevard.

Notable Writers of Tragedy

Examples of Literary Tragedies

1. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

One of Shakespeare’s lesser-known and least-produced tragedies, Titus Andronicus, is also his most gruesome. This revenge play tells the story of a Roman general, Titus Andronicus, who returns home to implement a meticulous, bloody vengeance on those who wronged him. Seeking vengeance of her own, Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, sets out to avenge the death of her son at the hands of Titus. Their machinations culminate in a grisly scene of mass death, in which Titus serves Tamora a meat pie made with the remains of her murdered sons before Saturninus, Tamora’s husband, kills him.

2. James Baldwin, The Amen Corner

Set in and around a Harlem church, The Amen Corner is about Pastor Margaret Jackson, whose estranged husband Luke returns to her. His arrival reveals that she lied about Luke abandoning her and their son David years ago; in actuality, she left Luke to seek a religious vocation. This revelation fractures the family and results in David breaking off his relationship with his mother and the congregation expelling Margaret from the church. In the end, Margaret, now without a son, a husband, or a congregation, understands she shouldn’t have used her faith as an excuse to run from her life and commitments.

3. Marsha Norman, ‘night, Mother

Norman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘night, Mother is a character study charting one fateful night in the life of a middle-aged woman, Jessie, and her elderly mother, Thelma. The play opens with Jessie informing Thelma that she plans to kill herself later that night. This sets off a long, intense conversation between mother and daughter, in which they each disclose their frustrations and fears. By evening’s end, Jessie’s frank confessions leave Thelma feeling like she never knew her daughter. At the close of the play, Jessie locks herself in her bedroom and shoots herself.

Further Resources on Tragedies

Dr. Debora B. Schwartz breaks down tragedies in Shakespeare’s plays.

Pen & the Pad offers an overview of differences between classical and modern tragedies.

Goodreads has a list of popular tragic books, including many plays.

Literary Theory and Criticism provides an in-depth introduction to tragedy, with more detailed information on Aristotle’s theories of the genre.

This paper delves into the Greek theory of tragedy and its subsequent effects on the genre.