Hamlet: Tragedy in Hamlet The tradition of literature includes many genres. One of the oldest and most important of these genres is tragedy; one of the foremost Elizabethan tragedies in the canon of English literature is Hamlet by William Shakespeare and one of the earliest critics of tragedy is Aristotle. One way to measure Shakespeare's work is to appraise it using the methods of classical critics and thereby to see how if it would have retained its meaning. Hamlet is one of the most recognizable and most often quoted tragedies in the all of English literature. Aristotle, is concerned with the proper presentation of tragic play