Poetics

A tragic hero according to csus.edu is “... a person of noble birth with heroic or potentially heroic qualities. This person is fated by the Gods or by some supernatural force to doom and destruction or at least to great suffering.” Tragic heroes also share some qualities such as regretting their actions, going through mental/physical pain, and getting sympathy or fear out of their audience. In Williams Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, it is often asked whether Macbeth is considered a tragic hero.…

Heroes are the cornerstone of modern literature, without them, great stories of triumph and tragedy would not exist. Aristotle’s Tragic Hero Theory was created as a criterion to identify and compare the characteristics of such heroes. The main characters in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, are both presented as tragic heroes, having been put against Aristotle’s criteria. Between the two main characters, Okonkwo makes/is the better tragic hero. The reasoning behind…

The drama of Oedipus the King can be considered a tragedy due to the fact that it fulfills Aristotle’s three elements of tragedy. Aristotle defines a tragedy by having, “the different kinds [of enhancement] occurring in separate sections, in dramatic, not narrative form, effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions”(Russell). The first of Aristotle’s three elements of tragedy is peripeteia, which is “when the course of events takes a turn to the opposite”(Russell). Peripeteia…

Neville Longbottom and Peter Pettigrew, two completely different men with opposite values or two sides of the same coin? While both took very different paths, they both started out facing the same daunting choices given by war. Their stories ended very differently, but they began in the same place. Neville is everything Peter could have been and his character comes to redeem him a generation later. Despite their very different tales, their pasts are strikingly similar. When McGonagall…

While Absurd theater and Greek theater have many similarities the hero’s each play produces are very different. An absurd hero is always plagued with the certainty of death. They live their life knowing that death awaits them. The human condition is a major theme, and usually a depressing one. Even though these heroes are aware of their inevitable end and human condition they continue on and show a passion for life. They still seek pleasure and new experiences although finding such things seem…

A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the major works of the 20th century. Williams applied many autobiographical elements in his play. The title is significance as it shows that desire is the basic driving force in the play that will destroy the lives of each of the main character. The play belongs to the genre of the Southern Gothic as Blanche represents the faded, corrupt culture of the South. The play is a classical tragedy as it presents the downfall and the tragic end of the main character.…

Hamlet and Agamemnon are both tragic plays, which are intensely emotional and focus on the horror of murder and violent death. Both tragedies are comprised with the themes of love, loss, pride, and the abuse of power. The protagonists, Agamemnon and Hamlet individually commit an appalling crime without comprehending how imprudent and conceited they had acted. In both tragedies, the protagonist’s demise derives from their personal decisions. Consequently, both tragedies evoke pity and fear in the…

A perfect person does not exist. In reality, everyone has flaws, even including our heroes. A tragic hero is a highly respected person who has a fatal weakness, or tragic flaw that leads to his or her downfall. In William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus plays the role of tragic hero. This is shown through his nobility, his fatal flaw, and his downfall. Brutus was an honorable man who took part in the conspiracy not because he “loved Caesar less but that [he] loved Rome more”.…

Abdelaziz Hegazy Mrs. Douglas English 4/U Dec 16, 2015 King Lear Most of the characters downfall in the play are seen as being, the faults of themselves or the effects of other. The action of other characters does indeed affect different characters in the play. The downfall of these characters was and is the result of weakness and circumstance where certain characters have taken their role to the extremes where they cannot go back and correct them as they have already dug their holes up for…

The dog ate my homework. I didn’t know the gun was loaded. The devil made me do it. Since people have been alive they have coming up with an array of excuse for their own actions. Refusing to admit that it was simply their own fault. These excuses however, are taken to a whole new level when it comes to famous plays, especially those written by none other than Shakespeare, who tend to use the biggest excuse of them all: “fate”. One of the greatest plays by Shakespeare the story of “Macbeth”,…