The present thesis has as its subject the ancient Attic Greek tragedy, contrasted with the tragedy of Renaissance and early modern age. Focused on Sophocles’ King Oedipus and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, this study intends to treat them, respectively, in the historical and philosophical context they emerge: the ancient tragedy, in presocratic times, marked by the consolidation of the democratic process of the greek polis, the modern tragedy, in the rise of the scientific revolution and the rupture in the traditional aristotelianptolemaic cosmology, by the thought of Giordano Bruno, Copernicus and Galileo, among others, but also by Montaigne’s recover of the ancient skeptical tradition, the statement of the autonomy of individual conscience, as well as the irruption of the subjectivity, all of them, fundamental traces of the beginning of modernity and the principal dividing lines between ancient and modern forms of tragedy. In its very close relation with the original presocratic notion of cosmos, tragic poetics dawns as a statement that tragedy occurs precisely when something fundamental to this order is ruptured. Tragedy could be thought, therefore, keeping before us the archaic image of the universe turning upon an axis, as a poetics of the disarticulation of the world order or the poetics of the cosmos out of joint.