This document defines the key elements of a tragedy according to Aristotle and discusses how Shakespeare's play Macbeth illustrates these elements. It explains that a tragedy involves a serious action of magnitude that elicits emotions of pity and fear from the audience. The six main parts of a tragedy are identified as plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. It then analyzes how Macbeth embodies the classical concepts of peripeteia, anagnorisis, the law of probability and possibility, and the tragic waste.

1. ‘Macbeth’
Shakespearean
Tragedy

2. What is a tragedy? Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’
• Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is
serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in the
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-catharsis of these and similar emotions.”

3. Six Parts of a Tragedy
• Plot (Fable), or mythos - Plot is the Soul of a Tragedy.
• Character(ethos) – Tragic Hero (neither good not bad
but a rather good being) – Hamartia (tragic flaw)
• Thought (Central Theme) (Moral / ethical center)
• Diction (Language)
• Melody / Song
• Spectacle

4. Classical Tragedy
• Law of Probability and Possibility
• Deus ex Machina
• Peripeteia and Anagnorisis
• Complex plots have both ‘reversal of intention (situation)’ (peripeteia) and
‘recognition’ (anagnorisis) connected with the catastrophe. (pg. 20 Aristotle’s Poetics
by S.H. Butcher)
• Both peripeteia and anagnorisis turn upon surprise. Aristotle explains that a
peripeteia occurs when a character produces an effect opposite to that which he
intended to produce or reversal of fortune, while an anagnorisis “is a change from
ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined for
good or bad fortune.”
• He argues that the best plots combine these two as part of their cause-and-effect
chain (i.e., the peripeteia leads directly to the anagnorisis); this in turns creates the
catastrophe, leading to the final “scene of suffering”

5. Shakespeare’s Concept of Tragedy
Illustrate from your reading of the play ‘Macbeth’
1. The Conflict between the Good and the Evil
a. The Conflict: Inner as well as with others
2. True to Life (Nature)
3. The Tragic Hero
4. The Tragic Flaw
5. Peripeteia and Anagnorisis
6. Law of Probability & possibility – Cause &
Effect
7. The Tragic Waste
8. Character and Destiny: the extremes and
the golden mean: the threshold: the
twilight: the grey rather than the black and
the white
9. Complicating Factors:
a. Some abnormal condition of mind
b.The supernatural, ghost and witches
c. The role of chance
d.F
10.Catharsis
11. The Melodramatic Element
12. No Poetic Justice
1. Macbeth has PJ but Lady M…
13.Serenity at the End