The term 'tragedy' refers to a spectacle of human suffering leading to death and destruction, The sufferer/protagonist is a man belonging to high rank or station, neither all good nor all bad, but generally inclined to goodness, a man who, through some error, declines from prosperity to adversity, thereby arousing the emotions of pity & fear, and achieve a catharsis or purgation of these kindred emotions.
Aristotle in his famous treatise, Poetics, defines tragedy as 'the imitation(mimesis) of an action which is serious and having a certain magnitude'. Its purpose is to kindle the twin emotions of 'pity' and 'fear' and to effect a cathartic relief of these and such like emotions. The tragic hero must therefore be a person whose inordinate suffering arouses the twin emotions to their optimum when excess of emotions are purged out and a pleasurable calm is achieved.
An error or 'hamartia' lies at the root of the protagonist's suffering leading to the catastrophe. The tragic plot should be complex having 'peripety' and 'anagnorisis': 'reversal of fortune' and 'self-discovery' or 'recognition of truth'.
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