Aristotle what makes a good tragedy

He says that poetic mimesis is imitation of things as they could be, not as they are — for example, of universals and ideals — thus poetry is a more philosophical and exalted medium than history, which merely records what has actually happened.

The aim of tragedy, Aristotle writes, is to bring about a "catharsis" of the spectators — to arouse in them sensations of pity and fear, and to purge them of these emotions so that they leave the theater feeling cleansed and uplifted, with a heightened understanding of the ways of gods and men. This catharsis is brought about by witnessing some disastrous and moving change in the fortunes of the drama's protagonist Aristotle recognized that the change might not be disastrous, but felt this was the kind shown in the best tragedies — Oedipus at Colonus, for example, was considered a tragedy by the Greeks but does not have an unhappy ending.

According to Aristotle, tragedy has six main elements: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle scenic effect , and song music , of which the first two are primary. Most of the Poetics is devoted to analysis of the scope and proper use of these elements, with illustrative examples selected from many tragic dramas, especially those of Sophocles, although Aeschylus, Euripides, and some playwrights whose works no longer survive are also cited.

Several of Aristotle's main points are of great value for an understanding of Greek tragic drama. Particularly significant is his statement that the plot is the most important element of tragedy:. Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and misery. And life consists of action, and its end is a mode of activity, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is their action that makes them happy or wretched. The purpose of action in the tragedy, therefore, is not the representation of character: character comes in as contributing to the action.

Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of the tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Aristotle said the music melody has to blend in with the play appropriately. Spectacle refers to the staging of the play. Again, as with melody, the spectacle should be appropriate to the theme of the play. Character is the second most important element of tragedy. Each character has an essential quality or nature that is revealed in the plot.

The moral purpose of each character must be clear to the audience. The characters should have four main qualities: A. No matter who they are hero or slave , the characters must be good in some way. The characters should act appropriately for their gender and station in life.

The characters have to have believable personalities. Each character must act consistently throughout the play. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions—what we do—that we are happy or miserable. There must be Unity of Plot. A good plot has Peripety or Discovery—sometimes both. Peripety is the change from one state of things at the beginning of the play to the exact opposite state by the end of the play. This could be something like the change from being rich to being poor, or from being powerful to being powerless, or from being a ruler to being a beggar.

Tragedy, Aristotle now argues, is superior to epic. Tragedy contains all the elements of the epic, but manages to present its story in a much shorter span of time and with a greater degree of unity. The concentration of the tragic plot heightens its impact on the audience.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Philosophy What are the characteristics of tragedy according to Aristotle? Ben Davis February 24, Aristotle begins by saying that tragedy arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culminate in a cleansing of those passions, the famous catharsis. The word is used by Aristotle only the once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy.

I think this is because its role is taken over later in the Poetics by another, more positive, word, but the idea of catharsis is important in itself, and we should consider what it might mean.

First of all, the tragic catharsis might be a purgation. Fear can obviously be an insidious thing that undermines life and poisons it with anxiety.

It would be good to flush this feeling from our systems, bring it into the open, and clear the air. This may explain the appeal of horror movies, that they redirect our fears toward something external, grotesque, and finally ridiculous, in order to puncture them. On the other hand, fear might have a secret allure, so that what we need to purge is the desire for the thrill that comes with fear. The horror movie also provides a safe way to indulge and satisfy the longing to feel afraid, and go home afterward satisfied; the desire is purged, temporarily, by being fed.

Our souls are so many-headed that opposite satisfactions may be felt at the same time, but I think these two really are opposite. In the first sense of purgation, the horror movie is a kind of medicine that does its work and leaves the soul healthier, while in the second sense it is a potentially addictive drug.

Either explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among teenagers, since fear is so much a fact of that time of life. For those of us who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a way to purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of pity. As with fear, this purgation too may be either medicinal or drug-like.

This idea of purgation, in its various forms, is what we usually mean when we call something cathartic. People speak of watching football, or boxing, as a catharsis of violent urges, or call a shouting match with a friend a useful catharsis of buried resentment. This is a practical purpose that drama may also serve, but it has no particular connection with beauty or truth; to be good in this purgative way, a drama has no need to be good in any other way.

But the English word catharsis does not contain everything that is in the Greek word. Let us look at other things it might mean. Catharsis in Greek can mean purification. While purging something means getting rid of it, purifying something means getting rid of the worse or baser parts of it.

It is possible that tragedy purifies the feelings themselves of fear and pity. These arise in us in crude ways, attached to all sorts of objects. Perhaps the poet educates our sensibilities, our powers to feel and be moved, by refining them and attaching them to less easily discernible objects.

The poetic imagination is limited only by its skill, and can turn any object into a focus for any feeling. Some people turn to poetry to find delicious and exquisite new ways to feel old feelings, and consider themselves to enter in that way into a purified state. Sophocles does make me fear and pity human knowledge when I watch the Oedipus Tyrannus , but this is not a refinement of those feelings but a discovery that they belong to a surprising object.

Sophocles is not training my feelings, but using them to show me something worthy of wonder. The word catharsis drops out of the Poetics because the word wonder, to rhaumaston , replaces it, first in chapter 9, where Aristotle argues that pity and fear arise most of all where wonder does, and finally in chapters 24 and 25, where he singles out wonder as the aim of the poetic art itself, into which the aim of tragedy in particular merges. Ask yourself how you feel at the end of a tragedy.

You have witnessed horrible things and felt painful feelings, but the mark of tragedy is that it brings you out the other side. The tragic pleasure is a paradox. At the end of the play the stage is often littered with bodies, and we feel cleansed by it all. Are we like Iago, who has to see a beautiful life destroyed to feel better about himself Oth. V, i, ? We all feel a certain glee in the bringing low of the mighty, but this is in no way similar to the feeling of being washed in wonderment.

The closest thing I know to the feeling at the end of a tragedy is the one that comes with the sudden, unexpected appearance of something beautiful. What is the effect on us of this recognition? Aristotle is insistent that a tragedy must be whole and one, because only in that way can it be beautiful, while he also ascribes the superiority of tragedy over epic poetry to its greater unity and concentration ch. Tragedy is not just a dramatic form in which some works are beautiful and others not; tragedy is itself a species of beauty.

All tragedies are beautiful. We noticed earlier that it is action that characterizes the distinctively human realm, and it is reasonable that the depiction of an action might show us a human being in some definitive way, but what do pity and fear have to do with that showing? The answer is everything.

First, let us consider what tragic pity consists in. The word pity tends to have a bad name these days, and to imply an attitude of condescension that diminishes its object. This is not a matter of the meanings of words, or even of changing attitudes. It belongs to pity itself to be two-sided, since any feeling of empathy can be given a perverse twist by the recognition that it is not oneself but another with whom one is feeling a shared pain. One of the most empathetic characters in all literature is Edgar in King Lear.

Yet in the last scene of the play this same Edgar voices the stupidest words ever spoken in any tragedy, when he concludes that his father just got what he deserved when he lost his eyes, since he had once committed adultery V, iii, Having witnessed the play, we know that Gloucester lost his eyes because he chose to help Lear, when the kingdom had become so corrupt that his act of kindness appeared as a walking fire in a dark world I1I, iv, This suggests that holding on to proper pity leads to seeing straight, and that seems exactly right.

But what is proper pity? There is a way of missing the mark that is opposite to condescension, and that is the excess of pity called sentimentality. Sentimentality is inordinate feeling, feeling that goes beyond the source that gives rise to it. Pity is one of the instruments by which a poet can show us what we are.

Shakespeare is in control here, and the feeling he produces does not give way in embarrassment to moral judgment, nor does it make us wallow mindlessly in pity because it feels so good; the pity he arouses in us shows us what is precious in us, in the act of its being violated in another.

Since every boundary has two sides, the human image is delineated also from the outside, the side of the things that threaten it. This is shown to us through the feeling of fear.