Tragedy

Tragedy, form of drama originating in ancient Greece, in which exceptional characters are led, by fate and by the very qualities that make them great, to suffer calamity and often death. Aristotle, in his famous definition, spoke of purification (catharsis) through the rousing of the emotions of pity and fear. The great classical tragedians were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Supreme in modern times is William Shakespeare. Great tragedians include Felix Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich von Schiller. In the 19th and 20th centuries, in which the heroic dimension of tragedy in drama is often shunned, the greatest exponents are probably Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill.