Aristotle said that tragedy presented characters who were above the average, while in comedy they fell far short.
It combines humor and tragedy in characters that are both vaguely portrayed and incisively observed, achieving a sense of mythic remoteness that is also somehow intimate.
It's not hard to see why Shakespeare put "Timon" in his trunk: the play, in which the well-heeled Timon gives away so much money to his so-called friends that he ruins himself, can't decide if it's a comedy or a tragedy; its characters have humors but lack depth; the plot is thin, with few dramatic reversals, and Timon's trajectory from philanthropy to misanthropy is a precipitous straight line.
While Gareth David-Lloyd feels that the love story between Jack and Ianto was not fully resolved, which is "part of the tragedy", the character and his relationship with Jack had been sufficiently explored in the third series for David-Lloyd to be "happy to walk away from it".
Aristotle said you could have tragedy without character; he was right – and we can also have stories without character or feeling.
This time around he is slicing and dicing three works by the brilliant, dizzyingly avant-garde author Luigi Pirandello: "A Character's Tragedy" (1913), "Six Characters in Search of an Author" (1921) and "The Man With the Flower in His Mouth" (1922).
Her extensive journal writing shows she identified strongly with those stories, tragedies, and characters.
Aristotle considered the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character in second place.
If, in a tragedy, a character is stung by a bee, they might mind.
Isegawa makes his country a locus of life, tragedy and character that, however roughly scrawled, stays with us.
(Ibsen didn't write tragedies — his characters' lives aren't determined by fate — but he understands the value of the disinterested voice).
