Definitions of Tragedy

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete (composed of an introduction, a middle part and an ending), and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions. — Aristotle, who adds that the protagonist should be great & the reversal attributable to hamartia or misstep, not "tragic flaw"

"When powerful forces come into conflict, individuals are sometimes the site of that conflict and are destroyed by it." — Sean McEvoy, scholar

"Viewed externally, Hamlet's death may be seen to have been brought about accidentally...but in Hamlet's soul, we understand that death has lurked from the beginning: the sandbank of finitude cannot suffice his sorrow and tenderness....we feel he is a man whom inner disgust has almost consumed well before death comes upon him from outside." — G.W.F.Hegel

[Medieval revenge feuds aka Romeo and Juliet are intolerable to society, and yet as the] "first modern intellectual of our literature," Hamlet realizes that "power is in the hands of a class whose values humane people feel they must repudiate." — Arnold Kettle, Marxist [The "fatal flaw" is not in the individual but in the state and the social order it upholds]

"Tragedy is so far from being a proof of the pessimism of the Greeks that it may, on the contrary, be considered a decisive rebuttal....Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and most painful episodes, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustible vitality even as it witnesses the destruction of its greatest heroes ... Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge — which is how Aristotle understood tragedy — but in order to celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity...." — Friedrich Nietzsche