Domestic tragedy

The Ancient Greek theorist Aristotle had argued that tragedy should concern only great individuals with great minds and souls, because their catastrophic downfall would be more emotionally powerful to the audience; only comedy should depict middle-class people. Domestic tragedy breaks with Aristotle's precepts, taking as its subjects merchants or citizens whose lives have less consequence in the wider world.

In Britain, the first domestic tragedies were written in the English Renaissance; one of the first was Arden of Faversham (1592), depicting the murder of a bourgeois man by his adulterous wife. Other famous examples are A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), and The Witch of Edmonton (1621). Othello can be classified as a domestic tragedy.

Domestic tragedy disappeared during the era of Restoration drama, when Neoclassicism dominated the stage, but it emerged again with the work of George Lillo and Sir Richard Steele in the eighteenth century.