  Schopenhauer sees great cognitive as well as ethical significance in the Ideas expressed in tragedy, for this genre offers “significant intimation as to the nature of the world and of existence” and shakes a person’s natural tendency toward optimism. The one constant in tragedy is the “portrayal of a great misfortune” (WWR I, 281), but this may be brought about, on his account, in three main ways: (1) through the exceptional wickedness of certain characters (he gives as examples of this type Shakespeare’s Richard III, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, as well as Sophocles’ Antigone among others); (2) through blind fate (e.g., Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, “most of the tragedies of the ancients,” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Voltaire’s Tancred and Schiller’s The Bride of Messina); (3) through morally ordinary characters in their typical relationships with each other. This last type of tragedy is the most valuable, for Schopenhauer,