1. Tragedy

2. Aristotle Poetics Tragedy contains serious action
Tragedy concerns characters of “higher types” like nobles and royalty.
Tragedy evokes pity and fear from the audience
Audience experiences catharsis: purging of emotions

3. Shakespearean Tragedy
Tragedy is an intense exploration of suffering and evil focused on the experience of an exceptional individual distinguished by rank or character or both.
2. Typically, it presents a steep fall from prosperity to misery and untimely death, a great change occasioned or accompanied by conflict between the tragic character and some superior power.
It might be said, therefore, that conflict and change—the first intense if not violent, the second extreme— together constitute the essence of tragedy (Mcalindon 2).

4. Hamartia and Peripeteia
The hamartia is “the error, frailty, mistaken judgment, or misstep through which the fortunes of the hero of a tragedy are reversed” (Harmon and Holmon 242).
Peripeteia is “the reversal of fortune for a protagonist” (Harmon and Holman 384).

5. Works Cited
Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 7thed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1996.
Mcalindon, Tom. “What is a Shakespearean tragedy?” The Cambridge to Shakespearean Tragedy. Ed. Claire McEachern. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.