What is Aristotle's view of tragedy?

Aristotle discusses tragedy at great length in his
treatise known as The Poetics. A particularly crucial passage in
that treatise contains the following statements:

Tragedy is
the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily
possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought. . . . [In fact,
every tragedy]  must have six parts, which parts determine its quality- namely, Plot,
Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song.

This passage
reveals a number of important aspects of Aristotle’s thinking about tragedy, including
the following:

• His tendency to think of tragedy
  as a distinct genre, with its own particular
  criteria,


• His emphasis on tragedy as one of the various
  kinds of imitation of life, by which people learn.


• His
  emphasis on the imitation of an action as the crucial aspect of a
  tragedy.


• His distinction between the action itself and
  the plot as the particular arrangement of the
  incidents in an action. An action consists of particular elements, but a plot
  consists of a particular arrangement of those elements (thus, a tragic writer might jump
  into the middle of an action rather than proceeding
  chronologically).


• His assumption that the choice of a
  particular kind of action will determine the choice of appropriate characters, thought,
  diction etc.  Thus, if one decides to write a play about the usurpation of the throne of
  Denmark, particular kinds of characters, thoughts, and speech will
  be appropriate to that particular play, while other kinds will not be appropriate (for
  example, making Hamlet a complete buffoon who speaks with a Cockney accent and who
  thinks mostly about eating nuts would not be
  appropriate).


• His assumption that all the parts of a
  tragedy must be logically consistent with one
  another.


• His assumption that a good tragedy will have a
  high degree of complex unity for all the reasons just
  discussed.


• His tendency to de-emphasize the final two
  elements he mentions (spectacle and song) as the least crucial, the least important to a
  true tragedy.


• His tendency to think very logically about
  tragedy, so that all the elements of tragedy just mentioned are necessarily connected
  with one another in ways that contribute to the artistic unity and emotional and
  intellectual impact of the
  play.


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