A 4th-century B.C.E. philosopher, biologist, and physicist, Aristotle also wrote what has been perhaps the most influential and celebrated work of literary criticism in the Western tradition.
A rather slim volume (some 30 or so pages), Poetics contains an even slimmer but very dense treatment of tragedy, a topic of particular relevance to this course because so central to several of our readings.
I offer here a rather selective overview of several key concepts. (For Aristotle’s full treatment of the theory of tragedy, go to Poetics, Section I, Parts VI-XXII.)
Aristotle defined tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” That’s quite a mouthful. From this definition we can draw several conclusions:
This latter point reminds us that in its earliest form, tragedy was no mere entertainment. One did not go to the theater in Athens as one might attend a play on Broadway. The experience of tragedy, in Aristotle’s conception, is a ritualistic, even quasi-religious one. The term purge (Aristotle’s Greek term is katharsis) suggests too a medicinal purpose: just as an anti-viral medication contains small traces of the disease it is intended to cure, so are an audience’s powerful human emotions of pity and fear exorcised through exposure to the very same.
It is the artifice of the theater, its mimetic power, that makes possible this experience of emotional catharsis. In what consists that artifice, the “language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament”? Aristotle offers a list of tragedy’s essential elements, in order of importance:
In Shakespeare and much of the theatrical tradition since his time, the delineation of character and the illusion of psychological depth have been paramount. In contrast, ancient Greek dramatists, whose plays were the exemplary models from which Aristotle derived his theory, treated character as secondary to the arrangement of plot. For it is the plot of a play that provides the set of circumstances through which the hero’s ethos or character is tested and thereby truly revealed.
These two primary elements—plot and character—are closely related by several other intrinsic concepts, namely:
Often translated as something like “tragic flaw,” the Greek term hamartia is really a metaphor Aristotle borrows from spear-throwing contests. It means literally “missing the mark.” The tragic hero’s suffering originates in an unfortunate choice, a “missing the mark” or bull’s eye, for which s/he is morally responsible yet at the same time somehow fated to have committed.
Peripeteia means something like reversal of fortune—an abrupt shift in circumstances that sends the plot and the tragic hero’s development (mythos and ethos) in an entirely new direction.
In the best plays, according to Aristotle, this sudden change of fortune or circumstance is accompanied by a profound moment of recognition or anagnorisis, wherein the tragic hero discovers some truth about himself and his circumstances that produces in him a profound anguish.
If combined effectively, the hero’s choice and recognition, combined with a sudden change of fortune and response thereto, produces in the audience powerful feelings of pity and fear—feelings alleviated or purged, finally, by the tragic hero’s decline and death.
©Robert Whalen, 2025