SOURCE: Liebler, Naomi Conn. “The Hobby-Horse Is Forgot: Tradition and Transition.” In Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, pp. 173-223. London: Routledge, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Liebler focuses on the violations of ceremony in King Lear and Macbeth.

In Double Trust: Structures of Civilization in King Lear and Macbeth

It is necessary to recall briefly the Aristotelian definition of tragic action as the violation of specific social bonds:

Now if an enemy does something to an enemy there is nothing piteous. … Nor … when the two are neither friends nor enemies. But … when killing or something else of this sort is either done or about to be done by brother to brother, son to father, mother to son, or son to mother, these the poet ought to seek.

(Else 1967: Poetics 1453b18-23)

For Aristotle, the essence of tragic action was the violation of kinship and thus of...