M. R. de Groof English Conpostition

Tragic Hero

Jean An

#17

English Conpostition

03/10/2014

The tragic hero is doubtless the most important character in any tragedy. However, not every protagonist who comes to a miserable ending can be considered a tragic hero. According to Aristotle in his Poetics, there are three major elements that make a tragic hero: goodness, hamartia and peripeteia, and he used the character of Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as an example of a true tragic hero (De Poetica). Some two thousands years later in England, the legendary playwright William Shakespeare created a character of his own—Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. These two protagonists, though delineated very differently and seem to have no similarities at all, are in fact, under Aristotle’s theory, the same type of person because they both have the three necessary elements of being tragic heroes.

In the Poetics, Aristotle explains what he deems to be a true tragedy and true tragic heroes. At the opening of chapter 15, he explains the first concept that makes a true tragic hero, claiming that “[f]irst and foremost, that they shall be good.” The “good” here can be viewed from many different perspectives as scholars from all around the world have had different claims, including the hot debate on whether the “good” used here has any ethical sense. According to Charles H. Reeves from John Hopkins University, English classical scholar Ingram Bywater, also the man who translated this version of the Poetics, has argued that the “good” in this case “cannot be ethical in connotation, but means…eminent, great, or noble.” American scholar Alfred Gudeman also holds the same claim, while Italian physicist Antonio Rostagni has a similar belief, stating that the “good” here only “refers simply to persons superior to the normal (Reeves).” Based on these statements, we can conclude that it is believed that the “good” in this case has no ethical sense but indicates a person of a noble birth or who holds some sort of advantage, whether physical or mental, over the normal.

Oedipus and Romeo both fit perfectly into this category. Oedipus is the son of Laius—the king of Thebes—and has shown tremendous ability both in fighting and thinking. He is well known for being not only a great warrior, but a smart one, who managed to solve the riddle of the Sphinx and save the city of Thebes. Meanwhile, Romeo is the son of the Montague, one of the two most powerful families in the city of Verona, and is such a wonderful young man that he is barely ever accounted as part of the rivalry between his Montague and the Capulet. When Romeo and his friends secretly attended the Capulet’s evening party, Lord Capulet praised him saying that “He bears him like a portly gentleman; And, to say truth, Verona brags of him/To be a virtuous and well-govern'd youth (Shakespeare).” As seen, both Oedipus and Romeo are considered “good” because they are both of noble birth and are known to be superior to the normal.

Yet being a “good” man only makes the protagonist a hero. To make him tragic, there must be a hamartia, or tragic flaw, in the character. As Aristotle stated in the Poetics, the tragic hero should be “a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment,” or more precisely, a hamartia. He then used Oedipus, whose arrogance blinded him from seeing the big picture—the fact that fate is inevitable—and led him to committing errors in judgments of killing his father and marrying his mother, as one of his two examples. Similarly, Romeo was blinded by love and made rash decisions to marry Juliet and kill himself when he thought that Juliet is dead. Both the arrogance of Oedipus and the rashness of Romeo are textbook examples of hamartia according to Aristotle, and they have led these great figures to their tragic downfalls.

The last of the three elements—peripeteia, or the reversal of fortune—is what truly distinguishes Aristotelian tragic heroes from other tragic characters. There must not only be a turning point, but also that “the change in the hero’s fortunes must be not from misery to happiness, but on the contrary from happiness to misery (De Poetica).” Naturally, if the fortune of a hero goes from misery to happiness, hence from bad to good, he would no longer be tragic and the whole play would be considered a comedy (Reeves). However, when a “good” character goes through the peripeteia and fall from his original position of greatness, he would make a perfect tragic hero. Oedipus faces the peripeteia when the messenger from Corinth tells the truth of Oedipus’ identity, turning him from a great king all of a sudden to the source of miasma. Likewise, Romeo saw his reversal of fortune when he kills Tybalt and becomes an enemy of the Capulet. These peripeteia, though unrelated to their respective hamartia, are also keys that led to their tragic downfalls and made them tragic heroes.

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  Aristotle. "De Poetica." Trans. Ingram Bywater. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. 1453-1487. Print.
  
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  Reeves, Charles H. “The Aristotelian Concept of The Tragic Hero,” Vol. 73, No. 2 (1952), 172-188. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. 3 October 2014. Stable URL: <http://www.jstor.org/stable/291812>
  
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  Shakespeare, William. "Act I, Scene V." Romeo and Juliet. Cambridge: MIT. Web. 3 October 2014. <http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/full.html?