Tragedy
Shakespearean tragedy
Kastan sees Shakespeare’s tragedies as intense treatments of age-old questions about whether the causes of suffering lie in human weakness, divine retribution, or arbitrary fate. He asserts that the absence of clear answers to these questions is central to Shakespearean tragedy. While Shakespeare did not have a fully worked-out theory of tragedy, his coherent and powerful sense of tragedy develops and deepens with each tragic play.
If any theoretical pressures existed to shape Shakespeare’s understanding of tragedy they came more from medieval articulations of the genre than classical ones. Chaucer was seemingly the first to use the English word “tragedy,” in a gloss in his translation (ca. 1380) of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae: “Tragedye is to seyn a dite of a prosperite for a tyme that endeth in wrecchidnesse.” The felt need for a gloss suggests that tragedy was then an unfamiliar concept in English, but quickly the idea of tragedy as the fall from prosperity to wretchedness became commonplace. Chaucer’s definition is perhaps so limited as to seem obvious and unhelpful, especially in our hyper theoretical age, but in its very simplicity it calls attention to tragedy’s power, marking it as universal and inexplicable. It defines the inescapable trajectory of the tragic action but not its cause, and in its reticence about who or what is responsible for the dire change of fortune it speaks tragedy’s fearful incomprehensibility.
… Chaucer’s definitional reserve finds its most powerful analogue in the agonizing silences of
Shakespeare’s tragedies. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no breath at all?” (5.8.307–8), King Lear cries, holding his broken child. No answer is forthcoming, though it lies in the incalculable murderousness of the world. And directly questioning that world produces no more satisfying responses. “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (3.6.74–5).
These are the unanswered (perhaps unanswerable) questions of the tragic world. Are there reasons for the intolerable suffering? Is the tragic motor human error or capricious fate? Is the catastrophe a just, if appalling, retribution, or an arbitrary destiny reflecting the indifference, or, worse, the malignity of the heavens? …
For Shakespeare, anyhow, the uncertainty is the point. Characters may commit themselves to a confident sense of the tragic world they inhabit; but the plays inevitably render that preliminary understanding inadequate, and the characters struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old. And it is the emotional truth of the struggle rather than the metaphysical truth of the worldview that is at the center of these plays. Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the questions about the cause of the pain and loss the plays so agonizingly portray, and in the refusal of any answers starkly prevent any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering.
Perhaps here we can begin to discover the logic of Shakespeare’s tragic practice. Kenneth Muir’s oft-quoted comment that “There is no such thing as Shakespearean tragedy: there are only Shakespearean tragedies” merely begs the question of how “Shakespearean” modifies “tragedy,” either as an individual exemplar or a group. If Muir is only saying that Shakespeare does not seem to have written tragedy driven by a fully developed theoretical conception of the genre we can easily assent, but a coherent and powerfully compelling sense of tragedy can be seen to develop through the plays.
Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering, and as he writes in that mode the successive plays reveal an ever more profound formal acknowledgment of their desolating controlling logic.
From David Scott Kastan, ‘“A rarity most beloved”: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy’, 2003.
2 The pleasure of tragedy
In this extract Nuttall considers the tension between pleasure and pain in tragic drama. Early critical responses to tragedy considered audience pleasure in relation to the pain they were witnessing on stage. Contemporary reviewers more commonly praise the playwright’s ability to disturb the emotions of the audience and render them uncomfortable.
If we were all wicked, there would perhaps be no problem. A world of torturers would naturally be pleased by the blinding of Oedipus or else, to take a cooler form of wickedness, it would not be surprising if an audience inwardly driven by envy were to delight in the fall of one greater than they. But why does tragedy give pleasure to ‘people like ourselves’?
A cruel or sadistic pleasure in the blinding of Oedipus is immediately distinguishable from what Aristotle called the oikeia hedone, ‘the proper pleasure’ of tragedy (Poetics, 1459 a 21) and I fancy that the same is true – though less obviously true – in the case of the gloating, envious spectator. In the tragic theatre suffering and death are perceived as matter for grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn matter for enjoyment.
‘The pleasure of tragedy’ is an immediately uncomfortable phrase. Quite apart from the original basic collision between terrible matter and a delighted response, there is an awkwardness, somehow, in the very mildness of the term ‘pleasure’ – it seems a puny word to set beside the thunderous term ‘tragedy’ – adding a species of insult to injury. The Nietzschean oxymoron, ‘tragic joy’, is, oddly, easier to accept, because it fights fire with fire. I suspect moreover that the awkwardness has become more obvious in our century. For moral Dr Johnson it was self-evident that poetry and drama must please. A later kind of moralism taught a new generation of readers and theatre-goers to despise the pleasurable and to value the disturbing, the jagged, the painful work. It is now virtually unimaginable that a reviewer of a new play should praise it by saying that it offers solace or comfort. Conversely the adjective ‘uncomfortable’ is automatically read as
Glossary
Oedipus According to Greek myth, after realising that he had fulfilled a prophecy that he would both kill his father and sleep with his mother, Oedipus blinded himself with two pins from his mother’s dress.
Aristotle Greek philosopher who in 335 bc wrote Poetics, one of the first works of dramatic theory, in which he describes the features of drama and tragedy in particular
Nietzsche German philosopher (1844–1900) who wrote The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argues that Greek tragedy helped early audiences appreciate their own existence oxymoron language device where two opposite words or meanings are used side by side, e.g. ‘sour sweet’
Dr Johnson Samuel Johnson (1709–84) was a poet, essayist, moralist and critic who compiled A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which had a far-reaching effect on modern English. praise. Ancient Stoics and Epicureans argued about most things but they would be united in their bewilderment at this. I am a twentieth-century person and I share the general taste for discomfort. But the radical problem remains obstinately in place: if people go again and again to see such things, they must in some way enjoy them. Similarly, if you like the disturbing kind of play then this disturbance is something you like, must itself be a further mode of pleasure. The shift in taste does not resolve the problem of tragic pleasure; rather it sets an allied, similarly challenging problem – that of enjoyed discomfort – alongside it.
Many things, when looked at hard, seem to come to bits (or, as we now say, ‘to undergo deconstruction’). Certainly this is true of the notion of pleasure. ‘Quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry,’ said Jeremy Bentham, robustly. Here pleasure is offered for inspection as a luminously simple datum: of course poetry and push-pin are profoundly different things, but, meanwhile, pleasure is pleasure, semper idem. But the datum can prove strangely elusive. For example, while it may seem essential to the idea of pleasure that it be felt, pleasure need not occupy the foreground of consciousness, which will afford simultaneous space for objects of another kind. I mean by this only that one can enjoy an activity or process without at any point thinking consciously, ‘I am enjoying this’, or ‘this is very agreeable’; instead one may be thinking only of the activity itself. When two people converse we may observe that they enjoyed the conversation intensely, but if per impossibile one obtained entry to their fields of consciousness one would never find at any point a separately introspected element, ‘the pleasant’, but instead an unbroken preoccupation with the subject of the conversation itself.
From A. D. Nuttall, ‘Aristotle and After’, 1996.
3 The Shakespearean tragic hero
More than a century after its first publication, A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy continues to be respected and frequently quoted. In this extract, Bradley considers Shakespearean tragedy in relation to definitions of the genre offered by the ancient Greek writer Aristotle and by medieval writers. He argues that Shakespearean tragedy necessarily centres on a character of high rank and exceptional qualities who undergoes a reversal of fortune that leads to his own death and to a more general calamity.
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person, the ‘hero’, or at most of two, the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’. Moreover, it is only in the love tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest, including Macbeth, are single stars. So that, having noticed the peculiarity of those two dramas, we may henceforth, for the sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being concerned primarily with one person.
The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the death of the hero. On the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy; and we no longer class Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story depicts also the troubled part of the hero’s life which precedes and leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by ‘accident’ in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.
The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease, poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.
Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and – we must now add – generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example has a much larger part in King Lear than in Macbeth, and is directed in the one case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor characters.
Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it presented itself to the medieval mind. To the medieval mind a tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play… A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who ‘stood in high degree’, happy and apparently secure – such was the tragic fact to the medieval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name – a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.
Shakespeare’s idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of ‘high degree’; often with kings or princes; if not, with leaders in the state like Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in Romeo and Juliet, with members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a decided difference here between Othello and our three other tragedies, but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him in the Council Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great world, and his last speech begins,
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know it.
And this characteristic of Shakespeare’s tragedies, though not the most vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning, but it would not be true if the word ‘tragedy’ bore its dramatic sense. The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the omnipotence – perhaps the caprice – of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of private life can possibly rival.
From A. C. Bradley, ‘The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy’, 1991. (First published as ‘Lecture 1: The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy’, 1904).
4 Tragedy and madness
Mack notes how frequently Shakespearean tragic heroes suffer madness or are associated with it. Madness often seems to be a form of divine punishment, but also brings with it special insight and freedom to speak the truth. This resembles Shakespeare’s own use of art to reveal painful truths. Mack argues that art and madness both allow freedom of speech, but that their insights may be dismissed as merely fiction or nonsense.
I have kept to the end, and out of proper order, the most interesting of all the symbolic elements in the hero’s second phase. This is his experience of madness. One discovers with some surprise, I think, how many of Shakespeare’s heroes are associated with this disease…
What (if anything), one wonders, may this mean? Doubtless a sort of explanation can be found in Elizabethan psychological lore, which held that the excess of any passion approached madness, and in the general prevalence through Seneca and other sources, of the adage: Quos vult perdere Jupiter dementat prius. Furthermore, madness, when actually exhibited, was dramatically useful, as Kyd had shown. It was arresting in itself, and it allowed the combination in a single figure of tragic hero and buffoon, to whom could be accorded the licence of the allowed fool in speech and action.
Just possibly, however, there was yet more to it than this, if we may judge by Shakespeare’s sketches of madness in Hamlet and King Lear. In both these, madness is to some degree a punishment or doom, corresponding to the adage. Lear prays to the heavens that he may not suffer madness, and Hamlet asks Laertes, in his apology before the duel, to overlook his conduct, since ‘you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d / With a sore distraction’. It is equally obvious, however, that in both instances the madness has a further dimension, as insight, and this is true also of Ophelia. Ophelia, mad, is able to make awards of flowers to the King and Queen which are appropriate to frailties of which she cannot be supposed to have conscious knowledge. For the same reason, I suspect we do not need Dover Wilson’s radical displacement of Hamlet’s entry in
II. ii, so as to enable him to overhear Polonius. It is enough that Hamlet wears, even if it is for the moment self-assumed, the guise of the madman. As such, he can be presumed to have intuitive unformulated awarenesses that reach the surface in free (yet relevant) associations, like those of Polonius with a fishmonger, Ophelia with carrion. Lear likewise is allowed free yet relevant associations. His great speech in Dover fields on the lust of women derives from the designs of Goneril and Regan on Edmund, of which he consciously knows nothing. Moreover, both he and Hamlet can be privileged in madness to say things – Hamlet about the corruption of human nature, and Lear about the corruption of the Jacobean social system (and by extension about all social systems whatever), which Shakespeare could hardly have risked apart from this licence. Doubtless one of the anguishes of being a great artist is that you cannot tell people what they and you and your common institutions are really like – when viewed absolutely – without being dismissed as insane. To communicate at all, you must acknowledge the opposing voice; for there always is an opposing voice, and it is as deeply rooted in your own nature as in your audience’s.
Just possibly, therefore, the meaning of tragic madness for Shakespeare approximated the meaning that the legendary figure of Cassandra (whom Shakespeare had in fact put briefly on his stage in the second act of Troilus and Cressida) has held for so many artists since his time. Cassandra’s madness, like Lear’s and Hamlet’s – possibly, also, like the madness verbally assigned to other Shakespearean tragic heroes – contains both punishment and insight. She is doomed to know, by a consciousness that moves to measures outside our normal space and time; she is doomed never to be believed, because those to whom she speaks can hear only the opposing voice. With the language of the god Apollo sounding in her brain, and the incredulity of her fellow mortals ringing in her ears, she makes an ideal emblem of the predicament of the Shakespearean tragic hero, caught as he is between the absolute and the expedient. And by the same token, of the predicament of the artist – Shakespeare himself, perhaps – who, having been given the power to see the ‘truth’, can convey it only through poetry – what we commonly call a ‘fiction’, and dismiss.
From Maynard Mack, ‘What Happens in Shakespearean Tragedy’, 1993.
Kastan sees Shakespeare’s tragedies as intense treatments of age-old questions about whether the causes of suffering lie in human weakness, divine retribution, or arbitrary fate. He asserts that the absence of clear answers to these questions is central to Shakespearean tragedy. While Shakespeare did not have a fully worked-out theory of tragedy, his coherent and powerful sense of tragedy develops and deepens with each tragic play.
If any theoretical pressures existed to shape Shakespeare’s understanding of tragedy they came more from medieval articulations of the genre than classical ones. Chaucer was seemingly the first to use the English word “tragedy,” in a gloss in his translation (ca. 1380) of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae: “Tragedye is to seyn a dite of a prosperite for a tyme that endeth in wrecchidnesse.” The felt need for a gloss suggests that tragedy was then an unfamiliar concept in English, but quickly the idea of tragedy as the fall from prosperity to wretchedness became commonplace. Chaucer’s definition is perhaps so limited as to seem obvious and unhelpful, especially in our hyper theoretical age, but in its very simplicity it calls attention to tragedy’s power, marking it as universal and inexplicable. It defines the inescapable trajectory of the tragic action but not its cause, and in its reticence about who or what is responsible for the dire change of fortune it speaks tragedy’s fearful incomprehensibility.
… Chaucer’s definitional reserve finds its most powerful analogue in the agonizing silences of
Shakespeare’s tragedies. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no breath at all?” (5.8.307–8), King Lear cries, holding his broken child. No answer is forthcoming, though it lies in the incalculable murderousness of the world. And directly questioning that world produces no more satisfying responses. “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (3.6.74–5).
These are the unanswered (perhaps unanswerable) questions of the tragic world. Are there reasons for the intolerable suffering? Is the tragic motor human error or capricious fate? Is the catastrophe a just, if appalling, retribution, or an arbitrary destiny reflecting the indifference, or, worse, the malignity of the heavens? …
For Shakespeare, anyhow, the uncertainty is the point. Characters may commit themselves to a confident sense of the tragic world they inhabit; but the plays inevitably render that preliminary understanding inadequate, and the characters struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old. And it is the emotional truth of the struggle rather than the metaphysical truth of the worldview that is at the center of these plays. Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the questions about the cause of the pain and loss the plays so agonizingly portray, and in the refusal of any answers starkly prevent any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering.
Perhaps here we can begin to discover the logic of Shakespeare’s tragic practice. Kenneth Muir’s oft-quoted comment that “There is no such thing as Shakespearean tragedy: there are only Shakespearean tragedies” merely begs the question of how “Shakespearean” modifies “tragedy,” either as an individual exemplar or a group. If Muir is only saying that Shakespeare does not seem to have written tragedy driven by a fully developed theoretical conception of the genre we can easily assent, but a coherent and powerfully compelling sense of tragedy can be seen to develop through the plays.
Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering, and as he writes in that mode the successive plays reveal an ever more profound formal acknowledgment of their desolating controlling logic.
From David Scott Kastan, ‘“A rarity most beloved”: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy’, 2003.
2 The pleasure of tragedy
In this extract Nuttall considers the tension between pleasure and pain in tragic drama. Early critical responses to tragedy considered audience pleasure in relation to the pain they were witnessing on stage. Contemporary reviewers more commonly praise the playwright’s ability to disturb the emotions of the audience and render them uncomfortable.
If we were all wicked, there would perhaps be no problem. A world of torturers would naturally be pleased by the blinding of Oedipus or else, to take a cooler form of wickedness, it would not be surprising if an audience inwardly driven by envy were to delight in the fall of one greater than they. But why does tragedy give pleasure to ‘people like ourselves’?
A cruel or sadistic pleasure in the blinding of Oedipus is immediately distinguishable from what Aristotle called the oikeia hedone, ‘the proper pleasure’ of tragedy (Poetics, 1459 a 21) and I fancy that the same is true – though less obviously true – in the case of the gloating, envious spectator. In the tragic theatre suffering and death are perceived as matter for grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn matter for enjoyment.
‘The pleasure of tragedy’ is an immediately uncomfortable phrase. Quite apart from the original basic collision between terrible matter and a delighted response, there is an awkwardness, somehow, in the very mildness of the term ‘pleasure’ – it seems a puny word to set beside the thunderous term ‘tragedy’ – adding a species of insult to injury. The Nietzschean oxymoron, ‘tragic joy’, is, oddly, easier to accept, because it fights fire with fire. I suspect moreover that the awkwardness has become more obvious in our century. For moral Dr Johnson it was self-evident that poetry and drama must please. A later kind of moralism taught a new generation of readers and theatre-goers to despise the pleasurable and to value the disturbing, the jagged, the painful work. It is now virtually unimaginable that a reviewer of a new play should praise it by saying that it offers solace or comfort. Conversely the adjective ‘uncomfortable’ is automatically read as
Glossary
Oedipus According to Greek myth, after realising that he had fulfilled a prophecy that he would both kill his father and sleep with his mother, Oedipus blinded himself with two pins from his mother’s dress.
Aristotle Greek philosopher who in 335 bc wrote Poetics, one of the first works of dramatic theory, in which he describes the features of drama and tragedy in particular
Nietzsche German philosopher (1844–1900) who wrote The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argues that Greek tragedy helped early audiences appreciate their own existence oxymoron language device where two opposite words or meanings are used side by side, e.g. ‘sour sweet’
Dr Johnson Samuel Johnson (1709–84) was a poet, essayist, moralist and critic who compiled A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which had a far-reaching effect on modern English. praise. Ancient Stoics and Epicureans argued about most things but they would be united in their bewilderment at this. I am a twentieth-century person and I share the general taste for discomfort. But the radical problem remains obstinately in place: if people go again and again to see such things, they must in some way enjoy them. Similarly, if you like the disturbing kind of play then this disturbance is something you like, must itself be a further mode of pleasure. The shift in taste does not resolve the problem of tragic pleasure; rather it sets an allied, similarly challenging problem – that of enjoyed discomfort – alongside it.
Many things, when looked at hard, seem to come to bits (or, as we now say, ‘to undergo deconstruction’). Certainly this is true of the notion of pleasure. ‘Quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry,’ said Jeremy Bentham, robustly. Here pleasure is offered for inspection as a luminously simple datum: of course poetry and push-pin are profoundly different things, but, meanwhile, pleasure is pleasure, semper idem. But the datum can prove strangely elusive. For example, while it may seem essential to the idea of pleasure that it be felt, pleasure need not occupy the foreground of consciousness, which will afford simultaneous space for objects of another kind. I mean by this only that one can enjoy an activity or process without at any point thinking consciously, ‘I am enjoying this’, or ‘this is very agreeable’; instead one may be thinking only of the activity itself. When two people converse we may observe that they enjoyed the conversation intensely, but if per impossibile one obtained entry to their fields of consciousness one would never find at any point a separately introspected element, ‘the pleasant’, but instead an unbroken preoccupation with the subject of the conversation itself.
From A. D. Nuttall, ‘Aristotle and After’, 1996.
3 The Shakespearean tragic hero
More than a century after its first publication, A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy continues to be respected and frequently quoted. In this extract, Bradley considers Shakespearean tragedy in relation to definitions of the genre offered by the ancient Greek writer Aristotle and by medieval writers. He argues that Shakespearean tragedy necessarily centres on a character of high rank and exceptional qualities who undergoes a reversal of fortune that leads to his own death and to a more general calamity.
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person, the ‘hero’, or at most of two, the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’. Moreover, it is only in the love tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest, including Macbeth, are single stars. So that, having noticed the peculiarity of those two dramas, we may henceforth, for the sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being concerned primarily with one person.
The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the death of the hero. On the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy; and we no longer class Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story depicts also the troubled part of the hero’s life which precedes and leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by ‘accident’ in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.
The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease, poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.
Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and – we must now add – generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example has a much larger part in King Lear than in Macbeth, and is directed in the one case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor characters.
Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it presented itself to the medieval mind. To the medieval mind a tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play… A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who ‘stood in high degree’, happy and apparently secure – such was the tragic fact to the medieval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name – a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.
Shakespeare’s idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of ‘high degree’; often with kings or princes; if not, with leaders in the state like Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in Romeo and Juliet, with members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a decided difference here between Othello and our three other tragedies, but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him in the Council Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great world, and his last speech begins,
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know it.
And this characteristic of Shakespeare’s tragedies, though not the most vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning, but it would not be true if the word ‘tragedy’ bore its dramatic sense. The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the omnipotence – perhaps the caprice – of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of private life can possibly rival.
From A. C. Bradley, ‘The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy’, 1991. (First published as ‘Lecture 1: The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy’, 1904).
4 Tragedy and madness
Mack notes how frequently Shakespearean tragic heroes suffer madness or are associated with it. Madness often seems to be a form of divine punishment, but also brings with it special insight and freedom to speak the truth. This resembles Shakespeare’s own use of art to reveal painful truths. Mack argues that art and madness both allow freedom of speech, but that their insights may be dismissed as merely fiction or nonsense.
I have kept to the end, and out of proper order, the most interesting of all the symbolic elements in the hero’s second phase. This is his experience of madness. One discovers with some surprise, I think, how many of Shakespeare’s heroes are associated with this disease…
What (if anything), one wonders, may this mean? Doubtless a sort of explanation can be found in Elizabethan psychological lore, which held that the excess of any passion approached madness, and in the general prevalence through Seneca and other sources, of the adage: Quos vult perdere Jupiter dementat prius. Furthermore, madness, when actually exhibited, was dramatically useful, as Kyd had shown. It was arresting in itself, and it allowed the combination in a single figure of tragic hero and buffoon, to whom could be accorded the licence of the allowed fool in speech and action.
Just possibly, however, there was yet more to it than this, if we may judge by Shakespeare’s sketches of madness in Hamlet and King Lear. In both these, madness is to some degree a punishment or doom, corresponding to the adage. Lear prays to the heavens that he may not suffer madness, and Hamlet asks Laertes, in his apology before the duel, to overlook his conduct, since ‘you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d / With a sore distraction’. It is equally obvious, however, that in both instances the madness has a further dimension, as insight, and this is true also of Ophelia. Ophelia, mad, is able to make awards of flowers to the King and Queen which are appropriate to frailties of which she cannot be supposed to have conscious knowledge. For the same reason, I suspect we do not need Dover Wilson’s radical displacement of Hamlet’s entry in
II. ii, so as to enable him to overhear Polonius. It is enough that Hamlet wears, even if it is for the moment self-assumed, the guise of the madman. As such, he can be presumed to have intuitive unformulated awarenesses that reach the surface in free (yet relevant) associations, like those of Polonius with a fishmonger, Ophelia with carrion. Lear likewise is allowed free yet relevant associations. His great speech in Dover fields on the lust of women derives from the designs of Goneril and Regan on Edmund, of which he consciously knows nothing. Moreover, both he and Hamlet can be privileged in madness to say things – Hamlet about the corruption of human nature, and Lear about the corruption of the Jacobean social system (and by extension about all social systems whatever), which Shakespeare could hardly have risked apart from this licence. Doubtless one of the anguishes of being a great artist is that you cannot tell people what they and you and your common institutions are really like – when viewed absolutely – without being dismissed as insane. To communicate at all, you must acknowledge the opposing voice; for there always is an opposing voice, and it is as deeply rooted in your own nature as in your audience’s.
Just possibly, therefore, the meaning of tragic madness for Shakespeare approximated the meaning that the legendary figure of Cassandra (whom Shakespeare had in fact put briefly on his stage in the second act of Troilus and Cressida) has held for so many artists since his time. Cassandra’s madness, like Lear’s and Hamlet’s – possibly, also, like the madness verbally assigned to other Shakespearean tragic heroes – contains both punishment and insight. She is doomed to know, by a consciousness that moves to measures outside our normal space and time; she is doomed never to be believed, because those to whom she speaks can hear only the opposing voice. With the language of the god Apollo sounding in her brain, and the incredulity of her fellow mortals ringing in her ears, she makes an ideal emblem of the predicament of the Shakespearean tragic hero, caught as he is between the absolute and the expedient. And by the same token, of the predicament of the artist – Shakespeare himself, perhaps – who, having been given the power to see the ‘truth’, can convey it only through poetry – what we commonly call a ‘fiction’, and dismiss.
From Maynard Mack, ‘What Happens in Shakespearean Tragedy’, 1993.
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