Tragedy

In practice

A tragedy is a serious story that ends in disaster for its main character, usually through a choice or flaw of their own. The hero is not simply unlucky. Oedipus insists on finding the truth, Macbeth listens to the witches, Michael Corleone decides to protect his family by any means. The audience watches them move, step by step, toward a fall they could have avoided, and that inevitability is what makes the form so powerful.

Tragedy began in ancient Athens and passed through Shakespeare to modern drama and film. Arthur Miller argued in 1949 that an ordinary salesman could be as tragic as a king, and screen stories have taken him at his word: The Godfather Part II, Requiem for a Dream, Brokeback Mountain and Breaking Bad all follow people whose own choices destroy them or the people they love.

The common mistakes are confusing tragedy with sadness, so that a story full of bad luck is called tragic when the hero did nothing to cause it, and making the protagonist so wicked that the audience feels relief rather than pity at the fall. A tragic hero has to be someone we understand and partly admire, so that their ruin feels like a loss.

The turn toward a fall

This is the tragic choice, the moment the rest of the story will follow from. Ruth is not a villain: the hospital bill tells the audience why, and her hesitation over the second bundle shows that she knows exactly what she is doing. The steady signature is the chilling part. From here, the audience will watch her try to manage the consequences and sense, long before she does, that she cannot.

What a tragedy is

A tragedy is a drama or story in which the main character suffers a downfall, often ending in death, as a result of their own choices, a flaw of character or a conflict with forces greater than themselves. Tragedy treats its subject seriously and invites the audience to feel pity and fear for the hero.

Aristotle gave the most influential definition in his Poetics: a tragedy imitates a serious and complete action, in elevated language, through drama rather than narration, and through pity and fear it brings about the catharsis of those emotions. He held that the best tragedies turn on a hero who is neither perfect nor evil, whose fall comes from a mistake (hamartia).

Aristotle also named two turning points: the reversal (peripeteia), when the hero's fortunes flip, and the recognition (anagnorisis), when the hero understands the truth. In Oedipus Rex they arrive together. In the everyday sense, "tragedy" means any terrible event, but in literature it names a form with this particular shape.

Greek and Shakespearean tragedy

Greek tragedy was performed at the festival of Dionysus in Athens in the fifth century BC. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are the three tragedians whose plays survive. They drew on myth, used a chorus to comment on the action and kept violence offstage. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Antigone and Euripides' Medea are still performed today.

Shakespeare's tragedies (among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet) broke the Greek rules. They mix comedy into the darkness, show murders on stage and follow their heroes through many places and years. Their heroes are undone by character as much as fate: Hamlet's hesitation, Othello's jealousy, Lear's pride, Macbeth's ambition.

Later centuries added new kinds. Domestic tragedy brought the form to ordinary households, and revenge tragedy, popular in Shakespeare's time, built whole plays around a quest for vengeance. Tragicomedy blends tragedy with comedy, either by mixing the tones or by bringing a story to the edge of disaster and then turning it toward a happy ending.

Tragedy in modern drama and film

In his 1949 essay "Tragedy and the Common Man," Arthur Miller argued that tragedy does not need kings. Death of a Salesman, his play of that year, follows Willy Loman, a worn-out salesman destroyed by his belief in success. Modern tragedy is more often about ordinary people, and its flaw is often a belief or a dream rather than pride.

Film has produced many tragedies. Citizen Kane traces a man who gains everything and loses what mattered. The Godfather Part II shows Michael Corleone saving his family's power and destroying the family itself. Brokeback Mountain and Requiem for a Dream follow characters undone by fear and addiction. Television added long-form tragedies such as Breaking Bad, which spends five seasons on a teacher's fall.

Screen tragedy often softens the classical shape with a survivor who carries the story's meaning forward, as Horatio is asked to tell Hamlet's story. The audience leaves with the loss and with an understanding of how it happened, which is the form's purpose: not just to make us sad, but to make us see.

Tragedy vs. comedy and melodrama

Since the Greeks, tragedy and comedy have been paired as opposites. A tragedy moves from order to disaster and usually ends in death; a comedy moves from confusion to harmony and usually ends in marriage, reunion or celebration. The same plot can go either way: Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream both begin with lovers forbidden to marry.

Melodrama is often confused with tragedy. Melodrama has heroes and villains who are clearly good and bad, and its disasters come from outside, from the villain or fate. Tragedy's disaster comes from inside the hero. If the audience can blame one evil character for everything, the story is probably melodrama.

A sad story is not necessarily a tragedy, either. A film about a family hit by an illness can be moving without being tragic in the literary sense, because no one's choice brought the disaster. Tragedy needs the hero's agency: the sense that it could have gone differently if they had been different.

How to write a tragedy

Start with a hero the audience can admire. Give them a real strength (loyalty, ambition, love, a sense of justice) and make the flaw that destroys them the shadow of that strength. Macbeth's ambition and Othello's passionate love make them great before they make them fall.

Make the fall a series of choices. Each step should seem reasonable to the hero at the time, and each should close off a way back. The audience should see the end coming before the hero does, which creates dramatic irony and the dread that tragedy runs on.

Give the hero a moment of recognition. The most powerful tragedies let the hero understand, too late, what they have done: Lear holding Cordelia, Michael Corleone alone by the lake. That understanding turns a disaster into a tragedy, because it shows the audience the person behind the mistakes.