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¡Dura ley! ¡fuerte caso! ¡horror terrible!
quien pensa que huey el riesgo, al riesgo viene;
Throughout the history of Western civilization, tragedy as art form has held a uniquely dignified place and exerted a spiritual influence far out of proportion to its size. Our own clinical theory has been marked, if not formed, by references to the central themes of a few tragic works of art—Oedipus, Electra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Rosmersholm, to name just those Freud referred to. It is obvious that tragedy, as art, evokes and reflects a very important personal experience.
The connotations of tragic are: an irresistible compulsion rooted in blindness, transgression of limits, most massive guilt and shame and ensuing punishment from without and from within, crisis and catastrophe, awesome suffering, a heroic attempt to solve the conflict but with inevitable failure, an air of total effort and total defeat, an eerie sense of globality and doom, and a clash of universal human values. Pervasive is the search and yearning for justice and the bitterness about injustice.
It is little known that Plato made a passing, though very relevant, remark about the essence of tragedy in the.monumental work of his old age, the Laws (p. 817). He calls the “imitation (or representation, mímesis) of the best and noblest life the really truest form of tragedy”.
However, the first satisfying and comprehensive theoretical attempt to abstract from tragedy as art form the experience represented on stage, as well as the one evoked in the spectator is, of course, Aristotle’s (1927) discourse, which takes up a good portion of the fragment modern readers have of his treatise, “Poetics.”
What is Aristotle’s definition of tragedy?
Tragedy is a representation of an action (mímesis práxeos) that is heroic (spoudaía) and complete and of a certain magnitude—by means of language enriched with all kinds of ornament