"Romeo and Juliet" - A tragedy?

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“Romeo and Juliet” – A tragedy?

William Shakespeare was a playwright and an actor in the sixteenth century. He wrote a series of sonnets and plays that have become increasingly popular. Many of his ideas were taken from other writers, and he transformed them brilliantly. His plays were of many genres, including a series of tragedies. “Romeo and Juliet” was part of this series along side other well-known titles such as  “Othello” and “Macbeth”. It was based on Arthur Brooke’s poem, “The tragicall historye of Romeus and Juliet”. Brooke’s version was long and insipid, but Shakespeare’s genius as a language craftsman made it powerfully vivid.

What makes “Romeo and Juliet” a great tragedy? To know this we must review the definition of what a tragedy is. The Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary identifies it as

“A species of drama in which action and language are elevated and the catastrophe is usually sad.”

On a more basic level, I would define a tragedy as a literary work that has a serious or sorrowful content, often a combination of events leads to a disastrous conclusion.

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher; he too made his own study of what constitutes a tragedy. His analytical treatise, “The Poetics” was based on the evidence of many Greek plays. He came to the conclusion that a tragedy must have these characteristics: a tragic hero, and a harmatia (tragic flaw). For example in “Macbeth” the harmatia was excessive ambition. He also concluded that a tragedy provokes pity and fear and that it produces in the spectator a catharsis of these emotions. In this way a tragedy can be socially useful.

Many Greek playwrights misinterpreted these ideas and declared them as rules, to base all future tragedies on. They exaggerated his ideas and this rule was created, that tragedies should observe the three unities of time, place and action. This meant that the action should span less than a day, there should only be a single setting, and that there should be one main character, and one development plot towards the main event. Any play that did not comply with these rules was not a true tragedy.

One of Aristotle’s ideas that was notoriously misused was his theory about unity. This theory suggests that the action in a tragedy must be a complete unit, and that events of which it is made up must be so plotted that if any of these elements are moved or removed the whole is altered and upset.

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Shakespeare broke these rules over and over again. He used comedy and subplots throughout his literature to give it a sense of reality, and to make it more interesting for the spectator. Yet every aspect of Shakespeare’s play contributes to the overall effect, nothing is carelessly placed. I believe that this is a more sensible interpretation of Aristotle’s Unity theory.

Despite the fact that Shakespeare broke Aristotle’s ‘rules’ whilst creating “Romeo and Juliet”, it is still known as one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. So what is it about “Romeo and Juliet” that makes it a tragedy?

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