What are the common features of Shakespeare's tragedies?

Answer 1

There are many features such as:

1/ most of his heroes are men such as Hamlet , King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, or couples like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, or Troilus and Cressida. Of course since the company had a lead actor in Richard Burbage this isn't much of a surprise, but the comedies do often feature female leads like Rosalind in As You Like It or Helena in All's Well that Ends Well or Isabella in Measure for Measure when the tragedies do not.

2/ his heroes are noble, not commoners, although the same is true of most of the comedies, and there are exceptions such as Coriolanus and Timon.

3/ he deals with human psychology, although all of his plays do this.

4/ academics like to squeeze the plays into Aristotle's definition of tragedy. This is obviously not a quality of the plays themselves, since we have no evidence that Shakespeare had a clear understanding of who Aristotle was even. Only one of Shakespeare's plays fits the classic definitions, and it is a comedy.

So, none of the above are really definitive of the tragedy genre. The one undeniable feature of tragedies is . . .

5/ tragedies end in sadness for the main characters, who usually end up dead.

Answer 2

Of course, Bradley wrote a book of some 366 pages on the subject, which should be read rather than any short answer which can be provided here. The first chapter of Bradley's book, written in 1906, is called "The Substance of Tragedy" and contains the following passage: "We remain confronted with the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy." Bradley points to the characteristic waste of potential, the loss of a potentially good person as the essence of tragedy, and proceeds to apply this to the Shakespearean plays which he chooses to regard as tragedies.

To a certain extent, Bradley begs the question, since he conveniently decides to ignore plays like Timon of Athens by claiming (as nobody else would do) that Shakespeare did not write it. But even Timon would conform with his final definition above.

Answer 3

Well, the main characters, who are probably doing pretty well up to some point in act two, end up in a terrible mess, and usually dead. Although you might hear about "the tragic hero", the main characters in Shakespeare's tragedies are often couples, like Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and Desdemona, Troilus and Cressida, and Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth. In some cases, whole families are destroyed (as in Hamlet and King Lear), and the tragedy flows from an underlying weakness in the society. Both Coriolanus and Julius Caesar have to do with the clash between people's individual characteristics (Coriolanus's pride and Brutus's "nobility") and the exigencies of realpolitik.