A tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy. 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.
A tragic hero is one that has one major flaw and the audience usually feels pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion.
Read more about Tragic Hero: Aristotle's Tragic Hero, Examples
Famous quotes containing the words tragic hero, tragic and/or hero:
“The tragic hero prefers death to prudence. The comedian prefers playing tricks to winning. Only the villain really plays to win.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish—about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives.”
—Robertson Davies (b. 1913)
“The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)