Tragic hero

A tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy who makes an error in his or her actions that leads to his or her downfall. Tragic heroes appear in the dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Marston, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, and many other writers of tragedy.

Other common traits

Some common traits characteristic of a tragic hero:

• The hero is sometimes led to his downfall due to hubris, or excessive pride.
• The hero usually struggles with an antagonist, where they fight to the death for what they believe in.
• The hero discovers his fate by his own actions, not by things happening to him.
• The hero sees and understands his doom, and that his fate was revealed by his own actions.
• The hero's downfall is understood by Aristotle to arouse pity and terror.
• The hero is physically or spiritually wounded by his experiences, often resulting in his death.
• The hero is often a king or leader of men, so that his people experience his fall with him. This could also include a leader of a family.
• The hero learns something from his mistake.
• The hero is faced with a serious decision.
• The suffering of the hero is meaningful.
• There may sometimes be supernatural involvement (in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Caesar is warned of his death via Calphurnia's vision and Brutus is warned of his impending death by his evil spirit).
• The Shakespearean tragic hero dies at some point in the story, for example Macbeth. Shakespeare's characters illustrate that tragic heroes are neither fully good nor fully evil. Through the development of the plot a hero's mistakes, rather than his quintessential goodness or evil, leads to his tragic downfall.
• The hero of classical tragedies is almost universally male. Later tragedies (like Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra) introduced the female tragic hero. Portrayals of female tragic heroes are notable because they are rare.

Tragic virtue

An alternative view of the tragic hero, especially in early Modern English literature, is one in which he or she possesses a tragic virtue (as opposed to the Classical idea of hamartia). In this paradigm the hero exhibits traits that would under other conditions be considered desirable but due to external circumstances cause their eventual undoing. For example Shakespeare's character Hamlet is often criticized for his contemplative nature.

Famous tragic heroes

• King Lear
• Macbeth
• Hamlet
• Othello
• Oedipus
• Brutus

Modern tragic heroes

In the modernist era a new kind of tragic hero was synthesized as a reaction to the English Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and Romanticism. The modern hero, rather than falling calamitously from a high position, begins the story appearing to be an ordinary, average person; for example, Arthur Miller's Joe Keller in All My Sons (1947) is an average man, which serves to illustrate Miller's belief that all people, not just the nobility, are affected by materialistic and capitalist values. The modern hero's story does not require the protagonist to have the traditional catharsis to bring the story to a close. He may die without an epiphany of his destiny and he may suffer without the ability to change events that are happening to him. The story may end without closure and even without the death of the hero. This new hero of modernism is the antihero and may not be considered by all to even be a tragic hero.