SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY What is a Tragedy? Arousement of Pity and Fear Catharsis Hamartia Peripety It is a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death. For Tragedy death is not essential, but for Shakespearean tragedy it is essential.

He wrote Four tragedies: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. Macbeth, a tragedy thought to have been first performed in 1606. It dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seeks power for its own sake.

Arousement of Pity and Fear According to Aristotle, Tragedy is a safety value through which those painful and morbid(unhealthy mental state)feelings of pity and fear find a comfortable outlet, a happy release, and in this kind of relief, lies a precise pleasure of tragedy.

Catharsis:The purification and purgation of emotions,especially pity and fear through art. The term often discussed with the term anagnorisis, that is a critical discovery, a recognition.Its the hero’s sudden awareness of a real situation. Hamartia: A fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic Hero.It;s a personal error in a protagonist’s personality that brings about his tragic downfall in a tragedy. Peripety/Peripeteia:A reversal of circumstances, or turning point.(The escape of Fleance is the turning point in Macbeth)

The suffering is exceptional, and it happens in the life of an exceptional man. The hero, Shakespeare insists must be great both in character and position. So Hamlet is the prince of Denmark and Lear is a king, Macbeth is a great general who later becomes a king. The hero of tragedy, in Shakespeare is not merely a person of high degree ,he is always an extra- ordinary man. The role of circumstance in Shakespeare is about as important as that of character.

Structure of Shakespearean Tragedy Exposition, Conflict, Resolution Aristotle puts it- a drama has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The technical terms for these three segments of the circle are Prologue, Peripety and Discovery. A tragedy too has these three points which may be called Exposition, Conflict and Resolution. There is an initial situation a certain number of persons find themselves in a certain situation, they stand in certain relations to one another. This initial situation is fought with dark possibilities of an unhappy entanglement . Difficulties have yet to start, but, they loom ahead and the future looks dark. This is the beginning of a drama. This part is called Exposition. Next conflict ensues and it grows.

Conflict The Heroes of Shakespeare, a wonderful lot, find themselves confronted by a most impossible situation . The result is the so called inner conflict, which is a distinctive feature of Shakespeare's Tragedy.

RESOLUTION The Hero in Shakespeare contributes to his tragedy, but he alone is not responsible for it. The tragedy is the point product of character and circumstances. To say that “character is destiny”

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