Aristotle said that tragedy is the "imitation of noble actions." In the time since classical Greece, however, society's idea of "imitation" has changed - the Romantics of the nineteenth century felt "imitation" was too naive, preferring to use the term "expression." Furthermore, "noble" is a somewhat ethereal word, since nobility is a human construct without objective criteria. The idea of what is noble and what is not changes over the centuries - Achilles' desecration of Hector's body seemed noble to Homer, but not to us.
That being said, nobility is necessary for tragedy. Tragedy reveals this nobility of human character even as its heros and heriones perish. Juliet dies only after demonstrating the beauty and power of love, for example. Nobody can write a good tragedy unless they believe in the nobility of the human spirit, since tragedy is an expression of that nobility's "triumph over the outward universe." Indeed, the best tragedies were written in the time of Sophocles and Shakespeare, in the Periclean and Elizabethan time periods, when the Greek and later English cultures were at the height of their cultural influence and power. Joseph Krutch says that these were "people[s] fully aware of the calamities of life [but] nevertheless serenely confident in the greatness of man." One could paraphrase this by saying that it takes a fundamentally happy people to write and have good, solid tragic drama. For these people, tragedy is almost a religion - a way to explain the cruelties of the world, and to overcome them.
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