There are many factors in a Shakespearean play that are common throughout all of his tragedies. These include:
- The protagonist must be an admirable but flawed character, with the audience able to understand and sympathize with the character. The protagonists are always capable of both good and evil.
- The love tragedies ("heart tragedies) (Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra) involve a pair of lovers unable to be together due to fate or society. The main characters do not control their own destiny but are controlled which either leads to death or permanent seperation.
- The "head" tragedies feature a fatally-flawed protagonist fully capable of free will who unfortunately has his good traits overcome by his ego. The hero is always faced with opportunities of redemption , but never able to take them and often leading to death.
****NOTES FROM ESSAY - SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
Shakespeare emphasizes that tragedy imitiates characters [ethe], passions [pathe], and deeds or experience [praxis]
- Ethe: the characteristic moral qualities of a man - the permanent dispositions of the mind which reveal a certain condition of the will
- Pathe: The ever-changing feelings and emotions
- Praxis: The actions that are inwardly conceived and then rendered objectively on stage
- The management of a good plot concerns the relationship between peripetia (climax) and anagnorisis (the recognition of what brings this about). These two aspects of the plot should be close together and appear naturally
- Shakespearean tragedy is pre-eminently the story of one person (hero/heroine). The story leads up and includes the death of the protagonist
- The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent by the gods; they proceed mainly from actions, and those actions of men.
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