To the Editors: In his otherwise excellent essay on the “tragic flaw” in Shakespeare’s tragedies [“No Comfort,” NYR, June 6], Fintan O’Toole falls into the all too common trap of attributing this critical idea to Aristotle. But the words Aristotle uses, hamartia and hamartēma, often mistranslated as “flaw,” do not refer to a character’s psychology […]
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