-
Cambridge Companions
Onlinehttp://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/companions/
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean TragedyEdited by Claire
McEachern
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747Online ISBN:
9781139095747
Hardback ISBN: 9781107019775Paperback ISBN: 9781107643321
Chapter1 - What is a Shakespearean tragedy? pp. 1-22
Chapter DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003Cambridge University
Press
-
chapter 1
What is a Shakespearean tragedy?Colin Burrow
Aristotle (384322 bc) dened tragedy as a mimsis of a high,
completeaction . . . in speech pleasurably enhanced . . . in
dramatic, not narrativeform, effecting through pity and fear the
catharsis of such emotions.1
Aristotle was explicating and evaluating tragedies written in
fth-centuryAthens by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, all of
whom were deadbefore he was born, and whose work he was attempting
to assimilate into hisown systematic philosophy. That philosophy
encompassed rhetoric andethics as well as biological theory.
Aristotles range of intellectual interestsboth enriches and
confuses his denition of tragedy. Scholars have fretted
inparticular over what Aristotle meant by catharsis. Did he believe
thattragedy purges excessive emotions in the way that medicines
could purgeexcessive humours from the body? Did he think of tragedy
as providing akind of emotional education, which might help an
audience learn how toexperience the right kinds of emotion on
appropriate occasions?2 Which ofthose aims Aristotle wished to
foreground is anybodys guess. Whether anyof his concerns were
actually on the minds of the fth-century tragediansabout whom
Aristotle principally writes is extremely doubtful.
There are two clear lessons here. Denitions of tragedy
necessarily comeafter the fact, and are usually embedded in larger
philosophical systems. As aresult they tend to be messier and less
widely applicable than they sound.Nonetheless, theoretical writing
about tragedy has had a massive inuenceon the ways in which
Shakespearean tragedy is read, understood and evenperformed.
Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) by A. C. Bradley (18511935),perhaps
now more often criticized than read, is the most inuential
singlebook on this subject. Bradleys view of Shakespearean tragedy
was deeplyinuenced by Aristotle, on whose Metaphysics Bradley wrote
an essay earlyin his career, but his adaptation of Aristotles
theory to suit Shakespeareis often awkward. Bradley argues that a
fatal imperfection or error3 inthe character of the hero is the
driver of Shakespearean tragedy. This isan Edwardian simplication
of Aristotles Poetics, which argues that the
1
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
high-born and virtuous characters who are the principal subject
of tragedyshould, in a perfect example of the genre such as Oedipus
Rex, suffer as aresult of some hamartia (Poetics, ch. 13, 1453a).
By hamartia Aristotleprobably meant not an ethical weakness or a aw
in character but aparticular kind of acting in ignorance, when a
protagonist unwittinglydoes something which under its proper
description he would know to bewrong. This happens when Oedipus
inadvertently kills his father at acrossroads.4 In the Christian
era hamartia was often rendered simply assin, and became associated
with both the general weakness of fallen beingsand the specic vices
of particular agents. Bradley is heir to that trans-formation of
terms and of ethical values, and his heirs in turn producedfrom his
work the cod-moralizing belief that Shakespearean tragic
heroesdisplay a tragic aw (Bradley himself never uses this phrase)
which ispunished in the course of the play. That is a recipe for
drama which couldonly appeal to those who want simply to see the
bad bleed, and who have aclear idea of what bad is. It is not the
recipe by which Shakespeareantragedy was created, and does not even
correspond very closely to whatBradley himself said about
Shakespearean tragedy.
Bradley was not just a student of Aristotle. He worked with the
idealistphilosopher T.H. Green at Oxford, and spent a period in
Germany. Hisbrother, the philosopher F.H. Bradley (18461924), was
one of the leadingEnglish followers of the German Romantic
philosopher G.W. F. Hegel(17701831). Bradley himself was the most
inuential English popularizer ofHegels theory of tragedy. For Hegel
tragedy was the highest form of literaryart, which dramatized and
then resolved conicts in the ethical sphere. So inSophocless
Antigone (which is Hegels exemplary tragedy) loyalty to thefamily
prompts the heroine to bury her brothers, while King
Creonsallegiance to the state leads him to have the bodies of
rebels exposed tothe air. In the tragic climax there is for Hegel a
resolution of those distinctethical perspectives, in which each is
reabsorbed into a higher totality.Tragedy could therefore act as an
engine of development in ethical thinking,which for Hegel, as for
his follower Marx, evolves through a dialecticbetween two
interconnected but opposing elements. Hegel regardedShakespearean
tragedy as a product of a late and subjective stage of
ethicalthought, in which conicts and their resolution were internal
to its heroesrather than objectively embodied in different agents.
The result is heroeslike Hamlet who vacillate.5 Bradleys focus on
heroes who are torn by aninward struggle marks him as a popularizer
of Hegel as well as of Aristotle.6
It would be nave to suppose that to understand the real
character ofShakespearean tragedy we should try simply to forget
this critical tradition.
2 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
The idea that there is something called Shakespearean tragedy
which hasits own rationale and which offers unique insights into
the world and intothe conicts that shape and misshape the lives of
human beings is the reasonthis book is called The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy.However, it is tempting to try,
by way of a thought-experiment, to set asidethe theoretical
arguments which developed after Shakespeares death, andinitially
ask not what is a Shakespearean tragedy? but a rather
different,historical question: what was a Shakespearean tragedy so
far as Shakespeareand his contemporaries were concerned?As we shall
see, this question is noteasy to answer, but asking it can alert us
to many elements withinShakespeares tragedies which did not matter
much to Bradley but whichprobably did matter to Shakespeare and his
audiences.
What might one of Shakespeares contemporaries have thought
whilewatching Hamlet, and what could it tell us? Perhaps not much.
Theresponses of seventeenth-century theatregoers to Shakespeares
plays wereprobably not much more interesting than the average
remark overheard inthe foyer during the interval of a theatrical
performance today.We do have afew records of such thoughts, and
they are not on the whole inspiring.When the diarist Samuel Pepys
(16331703) saw a production of Hamlet in1663 the main thing that
struck him was not the princes psychologicalirresolution, but the
fact that his wifes maid was onstage in a non-speakingrole. He
loyally noted that she becomes the stage very well. Pepys
certainlybelieved Shakespearean tragedy mattered: he devoted an
afternoon a yearlater to learning To bee or not to bee without
book,7 but when he sawOthello in 1660 he just described it as well
done and remarked that a verypretty lady that sot byme cried to see
Desdimona smothered.8Had the ladyin question not been pretty its
unlikely that Pepys would have noticed hertragic reaction. In the
1640s Abraham Wright (161190) was similarlycavalier, describing
Hamlet as but an indifferent play, the lines butmeane: and in
nothing like Othello, though he did enjoy the gravediggerscene.9
Simon Forman, however, left a more revealing record of a
perform-ance of Macbeth on 20 April 1610:
The next night, beinge at supper with his noble men whom he had
to bid to afeaste to the which also Banco should have com, he began
to speake of NobleBanco, and to wish that he wer ther. And as he
thus did, standing up todrincke a Carouse to him, the ghoste of
Banco came and sate down in hischeier behind him. And he turninge
About to sit down Again sawe the gosteof Banco, which fronted him
so, that he fell into a great passion of fear andfury, Utteringe
many wordes about his murder, by which, when they hardthat Banco
was Murdred they Suspected Makbet. Then MackDove ed to
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 3
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
England to the kinges sonn, And soe they Raised an Army, And cam
intoScotland, and at Dunston Anyse overthrue Mackbet. In the
meantymewhille Macdovee was in England, Makbet sleweMackdoves wife
& children,and after in the battelle Mackdove slewe Makbet.
Observe Also howMackbetes quen did Rise in the night in her slepe,
& walke and talked andconfessed all, & the docter noted her
wordes.10
Forman mainly records what we call plot rather than describing
the emo-tions of the characters onstage or their effect on the
audience. Nonetheless,he clearly brought notions of suspicion and
guilt to his experience oftragedy: he thought about what the doctor
infers from Lady Macbethsmadness and what the diners at the banquet
scene think ofMacbeth aboutwhich there is very little evidence in
the surviving text of the play. Thiscould well indicate that
educated members of Elizabethan and Jacobeanaudiences responded to
plays in general and to tragedies in particular bythinking about
how and what characters onstage knew. The processes ofinference and
conjecture that operated in Elizabethan courts of law, inwhich
jurors would make conjectures about the conduct and motives
ofindividuals, does seem to have inuenced the ways plays were
written andperhaps also how they were experienced.11 That is a kind
of psychologicalresponse to tragedy, although it differs profoundly
from Bradleys concep-tion of psychology because it concentrates
more on cognitive than emo-tional questions. Forman asks himself
not what is Macbeth feeling now?but who knows what about whom on
the stage?. That question may havebeen one which Shakespeare wanted
his audience to ask, since it hassuggestive parallels with Hamlets
attempt to use the play called TheMousetrap to probe Claudiuss
guilt: guilty creatures sitting at a play / . . .have proclaimed
their malefactions (2.2.5425). Shakespearean tragediesafter Bradley
were often treated as dramas of emotion; for Elizabethans theymay
have been at least in part dramas of knowledge.
Northumberland in 2 Henry IV describes a messenger entering to
bringthe news that Hotspur his son is dead: Yea, this mans brow,
like to a title-leaf, / Foretells the nature of a tragic volume
(1.1.601). Can we learnanything further about what Shakespearean
tragedy was by looking at theway tragedies were presented to their
early readers? The picture here is againcomplex. Of the thirty-ve
plays listed in the contents page of the 1623 FirstFolio edition of
Shakespeares dramatic works eleven fall under the sectionheaded
Tragedies. Curiously enough only three of these are actually
calledtragedies in the printed list (The Tragedy of Coriolanus, The
Tragedy ofMacbeth and The Tragedy of Hamlet), while others are
presented as justplain Romeo and Juliet or Cymbeline King of
Britain. Several of the plays
4 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
given these bald titles in the preliminaries, including Titus
Andronicus andKing Lear, are described as tragedies on the
running-titles at the top of eachpage of the play itself. Even here
there seems to be little rhyme or reason tothe titles: Timon of
Athens is grouped with the tragedies, but remains justTimon of
Athens even on the running-titles, except at the very start of
theplay when its called The Life of Tymon of Athens. The folio is a
far fromperfect guide to anything that went on in Shakespeares
head, since it waspublished seven years after his death. It
includes among the tragedies oneplay, which it variously calls
Cymbeline King of Britain and The Tragedie ofCymbeline, which tends
now to be described as a romance or a tragicom-edy. Troilus and
Cressida (to which it is notoriously hard to assign a genre)sits
anomalously at the end of the Histories and before the start of
theTragedies section of the folio, as though it doesnt quite belong
with eithergroup. This was probably a result of disputes over the
copyright for the playrather than a sign that a scrupulous printer
worried about its genre, butthere are good reasons to believe that
even the publishers who wereattempting to produce a volume called
Mr William Shakespeares ComediesHistories & Tragedies did not
feel secure about the generic boundariesbetween tragedies and other
plays. In the smaller and cheaper quarto formateditions in which a
number of Shakespeares plays were published duringhis lifetime
several plays classed as histories in the First Folio were
rstcalled tragedies, notably The Tragedie of King Richard the
Second (printedin 1597) and The Tragedy of King Richard the third
(also printed in 1597).Meanwhile two plays that Bradley included
among the big four tragedieshave in their quarto texts titles that
make them sound as much likehistories (a word which can in this
period mean little more than storyor narrative) as tragedies: The
Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince ofDenmark (1603) is at least
tragicall, but the True Chronicle History of theLife and Death of
King Lear and his three Daughters (1608) sounds like ahistory
play.
So a plays title leafmight foretell the nature of the tragic
volume.Or itmightnot. The evidence of title pages suggests that the
category tragedy was veryelastic in this period. That is of course
borne out by the extraordinary uencywith which Shakespeare
modulates between chronicle history, tragedy andmoments of comedy
throughout his oeuvre. Shakespeare himself used thewords tragedy
and tragic in different ways at different times. In the
historyplays those words are generally used to heighten moments of
fear, as whenNorthumberland anticipates the worst from the frowning
messenger. By thevery end of the sixteenth century, however,
Shakespeare was tending to restrictthe word tragical to contexts in
which characters are rather stiltedly attempting
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 5
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
to raise their language beyond its normal social register, or
which are actuallycomic. In A Midsummer Nights Dream (c. 1596) the
rude mechanicals play ofPyramus and Thisbe is described as very
tragical mirth (5.1.57). By the later1590s tragical seems to have
dropped from Shakespeares vocabulary entirely,with the telling
exception of its use by the arch-pedant Polonius in Hamlet(c. 1600)
when he describes the players who come to Elsinore as The best
actorsin the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral,
pastoral-comical,historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, sceneindividable or poem
unlimited (2.2.3636). Polonius once played JuliusCaesar, and his
vocabulary here marks him as being at least a decade out ofdate in
both his tastes and his critical language. Printers continued to
use theword tragical on title pages well into the seventeenth
century, but forShakespeare himself that word seems to have evoked
the literary landscape ofthe 1560s and 1570s in which the source
for Romeo and Juliet was called TheTragical History of Romeus and
Juliet. For him tragical came to connoteunrelenting woe, and a
slightly outmoded literary manner.
These arent just lexical curiosities. The slippage between plays
calledhistories and plays called tragedies indicates the extent to
which readers,printers and Shakespeare himself identied tragedy
with the fall of historicalgures (particularly kings and Caesars)
who were crushed by the grindingrotations of fortunes wheel.
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 13401400) gatheredtogether tragedies of this
kind (as well as several which dont quite tthat model) in the Monks
Tale, and seems to have been the rst Englishwriter call this kind
of story a tragedy. The Fall of Princes by Chaucersfollower John
Lydgate (c. 13701449/50?) developed Chaucerian tragedyinto a form
which could sharply address Lydgates own Lancastrian
politicalcontext.12 The appetite for tragedies about the fall of
princes, modelledloosely on Lydgate and on Boccaccio, remained
unquenched through thesixteenth century. In A Mirror For
Magistrates, which grew in regulareditions from 1559 through to the
next century, the ghosts of historicalcharacters end their tales
with warnings along the lines of Who recklesrules, right soone may
hap to rue.13 This vernacular model of tragedyestablished both a
general moral framework for Elizabethan tragedy and acrude boundary
to the social origins of people whose lives could be describedas a
tragedy. A play called The Tragedy of Bottom the Weaver would
beintrinsically comical, since a weaver is so clearly, even in his
name, close to thebottom of the social ladder. Falling requires a
measure of social elevation.Being part of a historical record
implies a degree of prominence too.
But the most important single fact to bear in mind when thinking
aboutany aspect of Shakespeare, or indeed about his contemporary
dramatists, is
6 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
that he worked in a relatively new and rapidly changing medium
under ahigh degree of commercial pressure. If he did not do
something new in eachplay then his audience would take their
pennies down the road to the Swanor the Rose or one of the other
rival playhouses. In this environment the fallof princes was one of
several tragic conventions which were not passivelyfollowed but
continually transformed. Shakespeare did indeed write playsabout
the fall of kings and (Julius) Caesars, but the way he did so was
usuallyslightly offbeat. Richard II (printed 1597) concentrates
with operatic inten-sity on the fall of a king and the rhetorical
arias with which he washes awayhis own balm.Most of the central
characters of later tragedies tend to be justslightly out of place,
or not quite as socially elevated as they want to think
ofthemselves, or are even men on the make. Macbeth is not a king
but awould-be king, whose desire to get on is accelerated by the
prophecies of thewitches. Hamlet is a prince who has lost the
prospect of succession. Othellois a mercenary warrior whose own
conception of his status is qualied byboth his and the Venetians
sense that his blackness makes him not quitebelong. Even Coriolanus
is an aristocratic anachronism in a period ofRomes history in which
power is shifting towards the plebeians, whileAntony is left behind
by the realpolitik of the rising emperor Octavian.When Shakespeare
returned to a fall of princes narrative in King Lear(c. 16036) he
again did something odd with it: Lear wilfully divides hiskingdom
right at the start of the play as though he is determined to
spinFortunes wheel right off its axle by his own efforts, while the
Gloucestersub-plot relates the rise and fall of another socially
marginal and aspiringcharacter, Edmund. This preoccupation with
upward social mobility sug-gests how profoundly the plays of
Shakespeares contemporary ChristopherMarlowe (156493) inuenced his
way of writing tragedies. Marlowe whodied just as Shakespeares
career as a dramatist was taking off tended todramatize efforts by
people on the edges of society shepherds likeTamburlaine, Jews like
Barabas, or scholars like Dr Faustus to dominatethe world and the
stage. The foregrounding of such gures in Elizabethantragedy also
has some connection with the relatively low social origins ofmost
playwrights in the period: Shakespeare, like Marlowe, could
barelyclaim to belong to the middling sort of men by birth, but by
writing for thepopular stage he came to be wealthy and relatively
well known. The tragedyofMacbeth is certainly not, as the more
reductive kinds of Marxist criticismwould have it, a fable about
the rise and self-destruction of the bourgeoi-sie,14 but it is not
surprising that a provincial glovers son should have feltthat
stories about the falls of princes might not speak directly to an
audiencethat consisted partly of London apprentices and artisans.
Characters who,
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 7
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
like the semi-tragic socially aspirational steward Malvolio in
Twelfth Night,were not born great but who wanted to believe that
they could achievegreatness were much closer to the aspirations of
his audience.
The literary criticism of the period suggests some further
answers to thequestion what was a Shakespearean tragedy?, although
again the answers itprovides are neither clear nor simple. For Sir
Philip Sidney (155486), themost inuential writer on poetics in
Shakespeares lifetime, tragedy couldshake the bodies of tyrants and
assist the government of the state: the highand excellent tragedy .
. . openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth theulcers that
are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants,
andtyrants manifest their tyrannical humours; that with stirring
the affects ofadmiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainty
of this world, andupon how weak foundations gilden roofs are
builded.15 Sidney ends hissentence with a nod to the conventional
view that tragedy represents themutability of fortune and the
fragility of high ofce, but he begins it with areal bite: tragedy
is a genre that maketh kings fear to be tyrants in thepresent
tense. That aim was a strong component in theMirror for
Magistrates,which began life under its Protestant editors in the
reign of the CatholicQueen Mary as not just a series of plangent
wailings by dead kings andcouncillors, but as such a biting
critique of government that it was initiallysuppressed, and was not
published until the reign of the ProtestantElizabeth.16
Shakespeares historical dramas (which include the plays set
inancient Britain, King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline), repeatedly
establishnervy intersections between present events and past
tyrannies, as Chapter 6explores in detail. Whether or not
Shakespeares Richard II was staged shortlybefore the ill-judged
rebellion of the Earl of Essex against the Queen in 1601,and
whether or not the Queen was referring to Shakespeares play when
shefamously declared I am Richard II, know ye not that?, the scene
in whichShakespeare dramatized the deposition of the king was
deemed too hot toprint until the fourth quarto edition, which
appeared ve years after the deathof Elizabeth.17 Shakespeare, like
Sidney, certainly regarded tragedy as a formwhich could probe the
wounds of the state.18
Sidneys view of tragedy was restated in slightly mufed form by
GeorgePuttenham (152991) in his Art of English Poesy (1589).
Puttenham locatesthe historical origins of tragedy in the
(supposed) period in which tyrantshad become things of the past.
Again, the function of tragedy is bothmorally and politically
reforming:
But after that some men among the more became mighty and famous
in theworld, sovereignty and dominion having learned them all
manner of lusts
8 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
and licentiousness of life, by which occasions also their high
estates andfelicities fell many times into most low and lamentable
fortunes, whereasbefore in their great prosperities they were both
feared and reverenced in thehighest degree, after their deaths,
when the posterity stood no more in dreadof them, their infamous
life and tyrannies were laid open to all the world,their wickedness
reproached, their follies and extreme insolencies derided,and their
miserable ends painted out in plays and pageants, to show
themutability of fortune, and the just punishment of God in revenge
of a viciousand evil life.19
Puttenhams Art, however, did not simply present tragedy as form
ofpolitical retrospect, which looks back to the tyrannical past to
nd lessonsfor the present. It was itself retrospective: although
printed in 1589 it wasprobably written during the 1570s and 1580s.
Sidneys Apology also appearedin print almost a decade after its
author had died. The slight antiquity ofboth these works was offset
by their social cachet, since both Sidney andPuttenham wrote, or
said they wrote, for courtly poets and readers, andPuttenham in
particular regarded poetry as one of the arts of self-presentation
by which an aspirant courtier could win advancement.20 Thestyles
and manners of socially elite groups generally trickle down
throughtime to less elevated members of a society. That
trickle-down effect certainlyshaped the poetic tastes of the
sixteenth century, since courtly fashions inverse tended to hit the
press, the market and a popular readership around adecade after
their rst dissemination. But we should not expect this processof
cultural diffusion to have occurred in quite the same way in drama
as itdid in poetry. Sidney and Puttenham chiey valued plays written
for smallelite groups at the Inns of Court or other small, closed
venues. Neither ofthem had a clue about how to appeal to the
popular audience who paid tosee Shakespeares plays. As a result we
might expect Shakespeare to haveread the theorists, to have thought
about them (respectfully), but notnecessarily to have been guided
by them in his practice.
One particular element in Sidneys Apology might have
inuencedShakespeare much more than it actually did. In the latter
part of theApology Sidney accuses contemporary dramatists of
mingling kings andclowns onstage, and of being faulty both in place
and time, by which hemeans that they failed to obey what came to be
called the unities of time andplace.21 Sidney probably got his
understanding of Aristotles unities notfrom the Poetics itself (of
which a Latin translation appeared in 1498 and aGreek text in 1508,
but which was not translated into English until theeighteenth
century) but from Italian commentaries. Nevertheless he
usedAristotelian principles as a stick with which to bash the
popular stage. Ben
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 9
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
Jonson ventriloquized this aspect of Sidneys criticism in the
prologue to theFolio edition of Every Man in his Humour (1616), in
which he scolded thewriters of contemporary history plays,
including Shakespeare, who withthree rusty swords, / And help of
some few foot-and-half foot words, / Fightover York and Lancasters
long jars / And in the tiring-house bring woundsto scars (912).
That was the moment when the prescriptive Aristotelianvoice of
Sidney spoke to Shakespeare as though from the grave.
But by the time it did so, probably around 1616, Shakespeare
himselfmay have been in his grave too, although it is not known
exactly whenJonson composed his prologue.22 If Shakespeare did live
to hear JonsonsSidneian attack on him there is no sign that it
inuenced the way he wrotetragedies, in which references to the
passage of time are usually markers ofmood and atmosphere rather
than signs of the playwrights Aristotelianaspirations to unity.
When the notoriously anachronistic clock chimesrepeatedly in the
background of Julius Caesar it serves as a reminder thatthis is the
moment at which the conspirators must act, and that time isslipping
away. Macbeth also contains bells, knockings and clocks, but timein
that play is so elastic that its almost impossible to track its
literal passage:the witches offer Macbeth kingship at an unspecied
period hereafter, buthe labours to make their hereafter happen now,
or tomorrow. After themurder of Duncan time stretches on, spreading
from the bank and shoal ofthe present through tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow to the verycrack of doom. Theatrical time and place
stretch and bend too: the sceneshifts to England in Act 4 while
Macduff and Malcolm slow down the paceof the play by their dialogue
about kingship and tyranny. This kind of time-stretching, in which
the anxious pause before an action can seem like an age,and the
period after it extend to eternity, would have been
incomprehen-sible, and perhaps deplorable, to Sidney. It was also
very different from thetreatment of time in Shakespeares comedies,
in which, despite Orlandosclaim that there is no clock in the
forest (As You Like It, 3.3.2545), timetends to be more classically
regulated than it is in the tragedies. The actionof the early
Comedy of Errors (1594) is restricted to a single place and
day,while Shakespeares last single-authored play The Tempest
(161011) ispunctuated with near clockwork regularity by allusions
to the hour,which remind the audience that the plays action
occupies not theAristotelian twenty-four hours but a magically
compressed three.
Shakespeares comedies tended to be more regular (in the
neo-classicalsense) in their treatment of time and place than most
of his tragedies for onesimple and highly signicant reason. So far
as most sixteenth-centuryEnglish readers were concerned there was a
far more developed and
10 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
accessible body of theoretical writing about comedy than there
was abouttragedy. The standard Renaissance editions of the
classical comediansPlautus (c. 254184 bc) and Terence (c. 190158
bc) included elaborateintroductions which discussed the ideal
structure of a comic plot and theprinciples underlying that
structure.23 The prologues to Terences plays alsoinclude critical
reections on his own practices. Classical tragedy could offerno
equivalent to any of this. If Shakespeare read (as he probably did)
someGreek tragedies in Latin translation he would not have found in
them anysystematic discussion of the structure or function of
tragedy.24 The surviv-ing Roman tragedies by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(c. 4 bc ad 65) are alsosilent about what a tragedymight be or how
it should be structured. In thenineteenth century and indeed in the
fourth century bc tragedy was thegenre on which most theories of
drama were centred, and was regarded asthe most intellectually
rigorous kind of theatre. For the sixteenth centurythat role was
lled by comedy. It was from comic theory and practice
thatplaywrights could develop their ideas about form, about plot
construction,and indeed about how to represent theatrical
characters in action.
This had profound consequences for Shakespeare in general and
forShakespearean tragedy in particular. The presence of comic
scenes inShakespeares tragedies was traditionally an embarrassment
to critics, althoughSamuel Johnson memorably defended his
interchange of seriousness andmerriment, by which the mind is
softened at one time, exhilarated at another.These comic episodes
the porter inMacbeth, the clown who wishes Cleopatraall joy of the
worm before her death could just be a sign, as Johnson
believed,that comedy was congenial to [Shakespeares] nature.25 They
also show thebanal fact that throughout most of Shakespeares career
the Fool was the mostrecognizable and at least the secondmost
famous actor in his company.Writingplays whichwould giveWill Kempe
or Robert Armin an evening off would be abit like putting on a
Rolling Stones concert without Keith Richards. Writing atragedy in
which the Fool suddenly and without explanation disappears,
ashappens in King Lear, on the other hand, was the strongest means
of showingan audience that catastrophe had nally arrived, and that
all normal theatricalexpectations were blown apart.
But the relationship between Shakespearean tragedy and comedy
goesmuch further than this. Classical comedy provided much of
Shakespearesthinking about psychology and human action. In the
plays of Plautuscharacters often form beliefs about what is
happening around them. Veryoften they do so on the basis of hints,
clues and tokens rather than of clearevidence. Sometimes these
hints and clues are illusions, and at other timesthey are
deliberately misleading performances (in a theatrical sense) put
on
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 11
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
by other characters in order to trick or beguile their onstage
audience.Sometimes when characters discover the falsity of these
illusory beliefsPlautuss comedies move into potentially tragic
terrain, in which peoplewonder who they are, or whether the world
actually is as they believe it tobe. So in Plautuss Amphitryon,
which is the only classical play to describeitself as a
tragicomedia, Jove and Mercury disguise themselves as a warriorand
his slave in order to seduce the warriors wife. The real slave
meets hisdivine impersonator, who turns him away from his own
house. He thinkshes gone mad. Elsewhere in Plautus characters are
frequently persuadedthat what they thought was one person is in
fact another person, and feel theworld melt around them as a
result. In Plautuss Braggart Soldier a slave whoapparently
witnesses his masters mistress kissing another man says I didntsee
her and yet I did see her (non vidi eam, etsi vidi, 407).26
These moments, and the deeper interest in the nature of belief
andtheatrical illusion from which they arise, had an incalculable
inuence onShakespearean comedy and tragicomedy. When Troilus sees a
womankissing Diomed who seems to be the Cressida who has just sworn
to lovehim for ever he cries out This is and is not Cressid
(5.2.145), in a direct echoof Plautuss comic slave which occurs at
the moment when the genericallyuncategorizable Troilus and Cressida
comes closest to tragedy. A world inwhich actions and beliefs are
founded on inference rather than evidenceprovides a perfect ground
for error; and perceptual error particularly whenit concerns love
and acts of sexual indelity which by their nature cannot bedirectly
witnessed can become a ground for tragedy.
Othello is in this respect not so much a tragedy as a classical
comedy gonewrong.27 The play starts in a conventionally comic
landscape, in which anenraged father blunders about at night while
his daughter elopes, and youngmen-about-town cook up schemes for
self-advancement. Throughout theplay characters insist that they,
like characters in Plautus, ground theiractions and beliefs on
probability rather than certain knowledge.Brabantio declares that
Tis probable and palpable to thinking (1.2.76)that Othello has used
magic to make Desdemona love him, and so assumesit to be true
although it is false. Even the Duke of Venice supposes it
ispossible enough to judgement (1.3.9) that the Turks are attacking
Cyprusrather than knowing it for a fact. Othello himself and in a
sense this is histragedy has a predisposition to short-circuit the
process of coming to awell-founded belief: Ill see before I doubt;
when I doubt, prove; / And onthe proof, there is no more but this:
/ Away at once with love or jealousy(3.3.1924). He does not quite
say when Im doubtful Ill look for moreevidence and assess the case
accordingly. Doubt seems to become in the
12 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
course of his sentence almost a foundation of proof: when I
doubt, prove.Othello is constructed as a thought-experiment which
is also a genericexperiment. It asks what would happen if you put a
powerful and eloquentwarrior who simply cannot bear to experience
doubt into a social landscapedrawn from classical comedy, in which
human mental realities are foundedon beliefs rather than on certain
knowledge.
The ultimate outcome of that experiment is not just Othellos
lethaljealousy, but the unleashing of intense physical and
rhetorical violence thatmakes the hero sound not like a character
from Plautus, but like an importfrom one of the tragedies of
Seneca:
Like to the Pontic Sea,Whose icy current and compulsive
courseNeer feels retiring ebb but keeps due onTo the Propontic and
the Hellespont,Even so my bloody thoughts with violent paceShall
neer look back, neer ebb to humble love,Till that a capable and
wide revengeSwallow them up. (3.3.45461)
Most of the ten tragedies ascribed to Seneca in the sixteenth
century wereabout ancient mythical heroes, although one (and this
is signicant giventhe connections between Shakespearean tragedies
and history plays), theOctavia, was a tragedy about recent Roman
history. Seneca wrote for andoften about periods of tyranny. He
served as tutor to the Emperor Nero,and eventually was ordered to
commit suicide by his former pupil. His playscan present acts of
spectacular violence, but underlying them is often anideal of
emotional autarchy or self-government, which might enable sub-jects
of tyranny to experience some measure of control over the
universewhich they inhabit.28 The combination of crafted rhetoric
and physicalviolence in Senecas plays has been given a rough time
by the criticaltradition, and their inuence on Shakespearean
tragedy has often beenseriously underestimated as a result.29
Shakespeare, however, would havebeen mad to neglect Seneca, whom he
could have read comfortably in theoriginal Latin or in the
collection of English translations which appeared in1581.
Playwrights in the generation just older than Shakespeare whom
hesought to emulate and supersede Thomas Kyd (155894) andGeorge
Peele(155696) in particular had made their debts to Senecan
tragedies of bloodinstantly obvious. The analogy which Othello
develops between histhoughts and the uncontrollable movements of
the oceans is profoundlybut not directly Senecan, since very often
in Senecas plays the universereverberates to the passions of his
heroes and heroines. Other moments in
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 13
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
the tragedies are explicitly indebted to particular passages of
Seneca. KingLear on the heath is Shakespeares strongest Senecan
voice:
Let the great gods,That keep this dreadful pudder oer our
heads,Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,That hast
within thee undivulgd crimesUnwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou
bloody hand,Thou perjured and thou simular of virtueThat art
incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,That under covert and
convenient seemingHas practised on mans life. Close pent up
guilts,Rive your concealing continents and cryThese dreadful
summoners grace. I am a manMore sinned against than sinning.
(3.2.4758)
Lear echoes, amplies and transgures a speech from theHippolytus,
a Senecanplay to which Shakespeare repeatedly returned in the
course of his career:
Magne regnator deum,tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentus
vides?et quando saeva fulmen emittes manu,si nunc serenum est?
omnis impulsus ruataether et atris nubibus condat diem,ac versa
retro sidera obliquos agantretorta cursus. tuque, sidereum
caput,radiate Titan, tu nefas stirpis tuaespeculare? lucem merge et
in tenebras fuge.cur dextra, divum rector atque hominum, vacattua,
nec trisulca mundus ardescit face?in me tona, me ge, me velox
cremettransactus ignis: sum nocens, merui mori. (67386)
Great king of the gods, do you hear about crimes so slowly? Do
you see themso slowly? And when will you send the lightning bolt
from your vengefulhand, since now the heavens are clear? Let the
whole sky collapse inwards andhide the day in black clouds, let the
stars turn backwards and swerving runtheir course askew. And you,
head of stars, radiant Titan, do you look downat this crime by your
offspring? Drown the light, and ee into darkness.Whyis your hand
empty, ruler of gods and men, why do you not singe the worldwith
your three-pronged brand? Strike me with lightning, transx me, let
theswift re cremate me: I am guilty. I deserve to die.
The thunder of dissolution and retribution was, however, by no
meansShakespeares only debt to Senecan tragedy. As early as 1589
the pamphleteerThomas Nashe was complaining that the Senecan style,
with its heroes who
14 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
utter sententiae (one-line memorable aphorisms) like blood is a
beggar, wasold hat.30 Shakespeare, always acutely sensitive to
fashion, took this prompt,and never imitated Seneca without giving
a twist of novelty to his imitations.Lears speech turns Hippolytuss
cry of guilt upside-down, insisting on hisown innocence, and
calling down destruction not on himself but on others.The storm and
thunderbolts which inHippolytus are only wished for but
arepointedly not happening are realized onstage. Hamlet (which
probablyderives from an earlier lost play in the Senecan style that
Nashe deplored)also has Senecan moments, but again these are
deliberately transformed. Atthe start of Senecas goriest play,
Thyestes at the climax of which, as at theclimax of Titus
Andronicus, a father is made to eat his own esh and blood Atreus
berates himself for failing to act:
Ignave, iners, enervis et (quod maximumprobrum tyranno rebus in
summis reor)inulte, post tot scelera, post fratris dolosfasque omne
ruptum questibus vanis agisiratus Atreus? fremere iam totus
tuisdebebat armis orbis, et geminum mareutrimque classes agere; iam
ammis agroslucere et urbes decuit, ac strictum undiquemicare
ferrum. (17684)
Lazy, useless, gutless, and (what I think is the worst failing
in a tyrant who isdealing with the most important matters of all)
unrevenged! Angry Atreus,after your brothers trickery and the
violation of all good principles, are youjust whining on with vain
complaints? Now the whole world should thunderwith your weapons,
and eets should be setting sail from both shores of thetwin sea;
now the elds ought to be alight with ames and the cities too,
andthe drawn sword should ash on all sides.
Any member of Shakespeares audience who had a smattering of
Latin andthat meant all those who had been to grammar school would
hear these linesbehind the soliloquy which Hamlet delivers after
the players leave him:
O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!. . .
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,That I, the son the
dear murderd,Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,Must like a
whore unpack my heart with words,And fall a-cursing like a very
drab,A scullion!Fie upont, foh! (2.2.50241)
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 15
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
No one who knew Senecas Thyestes would have missed the
differencesbetween those speeches either. Atreus goes on to make
his brother feedon his own children. Hamlet by contrast persuades
himself to act in thetheatrical rather than the practical sense, by
staging his play designed tocatch the conscience of the king.
Shakespeare heard in Seneca not just thesound of fury and cosmic
destruction, but also a voice of contingency andpossibility, in
which characters dont just simply do violent deeds, butdeliberate
over what they might do and what should happen. SenecasAtreus does
not just describe his actual revenge but a hypothetical
revengeintroduced by the modal verbs should and ought (Now the
whole worldshould thunder with your weapons). That tiny grammatical
detail, which issomething of a habit in Senecas heroes, was of
immense importancefor Shakespeare. He teased his Hamlet out from
those modal verbs, andmade from them a play which is grounded on
might in the grammaticalrather than in the physical sense. Hamlet
is throughout the play captivatedby verbs and grammatical moods
which evoke possibility: Now might I doit pat (3.3.73), he says
when he catches Claudius at prayer; Now could Idrink hot blood he
says just before he visits his mother (3.2.351). And whenthat fell
sergeant Death carries him off, Hamlet again speaks the language
ofpossibility rather than of actuality, with oh I could tell you /
But let it be(5.2.31617). Hamlet is a quizzical and almost a
parodic response to thephysically mighty heroes of Senecan tragedy;
but his indecision whichBradley, and before him Coleridge, and
before him Hegel, put at the centreof his character grows from the
space between speaking and doing which issuch a strong element in
the language of Senecas heroes.
That observation takes us close to the heart of Shakespearean
tragedy. Itwould be only a slight exaggeration to say that acting
is the central concernof the tragedies Shakespeare wrote in the
period roughly from 1599 to 1606,and which Bradley regarded as the
high-point of his tragic phase. Pickingup a sword and killing a
king is an uncomplicated matter in the heat ofbattle, but
deliberating beforehand, imagining a dagger, rehearsing the
role,putting on the borrowed robes of Senecan rhetoric in order to
persuadeyourself to do it: these are the theatrical and mental
spaces explored inHamlet andMacbeth in particular. The point at
which an agent is decidingto act, or is imagining the consequences
of what he or she might do,provides a perfect occasion for
soliloquies which represent the processes ofdeliberation. This
pause before action, full of potential and of fear, was not amoment
that Shakespeare simply discovered in the mature tragedies,however.
In Titus Andronicus (c. 15934) there is a long delay between
therape of Lavinia and Tituss revenge. In the interim between this
action and
16 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
Tituss reaction Titus himself acts strangely, plays mad, dresses
up as a cook.In Julius Caesar (1599) the pause before action is
shorter, but for Brutus itbecomes the occasion for what was called
deliberative rhetoric, in whichthe pros and cons of a particular
course of action are debated:
Between the acting of a dreadful thingAnd the rst motion, all
the interim isLike a phantasma or a hideous dream. (2.1.635)
What Brutus describes as the interim is the temporal space
between therst motion, or impulse to action, and its performance.
That period givesan agent time to imagine what he should do, and it
may spawn dreams andnightmares about what might happen if he does
it. Shakespeare, like mostElizabethan schoolboys, was trained to
compose speeches in which a real orimagined person might produce
arguments both for and against a particularcourse of action a skill
he deployed most famously in his theatrical careerin Hamlets
deliberation whether To be or not to be. Shakespeare also
readmanuals of ethics which described the complex interplay between
acts ofimagination and will and the workings of the bodily humours
and passions(discussed in Chapter 8). This enabled him in a very
different way fromSophocles or Euripides to write dramas which
address questions aboutaction, agency and responsibility.
Greek ethical thought was also part of the amalgam that
madeShakespearean tragedy, even if Shakespeare, as seems likely,
never read aword of Sophocles in Greek. Plutarchs Life of
Coriolanus, which was thesource for Shakespeares Coriolanus,
includes an extended discussion of howin Homer a mixture of human
appetites and external promptings couldprompt someone to act:
But in wonderous and extraordinarie thinges, which are done by
secretinspirations and motions, he [that is, Homer] doth not say
that God takethaway from man his choyce and freedom of will, but
that he doth move it:neither that he doth worke desire in us, but
objecteth to our mindes certaineimaginations whereby we are lead to
desire, and thereby doth not make thisour action forced, but
openeth the way to our will, and addeth theretocourage, and hope of
successe.31
Shakespeare was also an inheritor of a complex set of arguments,
which hadrun through sixteenth-century Protestant theology, about
the role played bythe human will in determining the ultimate
destination of the soul in heavenor hell. As well as all of this,
Shakespeare spent his days acting in a rathermore humdrum sense: he
learned lines, some of which he had written himselfand some of
which were written for him, and so experienced almost every day
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 17
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
the actors sense of inevitability, in which he knew the words he
was going tospeak and the events which simply had to happen.He was
therefore equippedto think about the grounds on which people act,
was trained to representthrough rhetoric the processes of
deliberation which might precede action,and he was skilled at using
his own voice and body in another form of acting,by performing in
plays. That made acting in Shakespearean tragedy a farricher
concept than it was even to theGreek tragedians, since it fused
togetherreligious, rhetorical and ethical thought with professional
practice. WhenHamlet laments that he has the motive and the cue for
passion but notpassion itself, he is speaking from this richly
multiple view of what it is to act.
This leads to a point where discussion of what a Shakespearean
tragedywas begins to suggest answers to the question of what a
Shakespeareantragedy is. The temptation to provide a tidy formula
for Shakespeareantragedy which resembles the quotation from
Aristotle with which thischapter began should be resisted.
Shakespearean tragedies have eclecticorigins, and that is the
principal reason for their aesthetic power.Shakespeares own
conception of what might be achieved by a play whichits printers
might want to call a tragedy kept on changing. He experi-mented
with late medieval traditions of tragedies about the falls of
princes,and hybridized these with Tudor thought about historical
process, and gavethem political force in the light of contemporary
beliefs that tragedies couldinuence the government of the state.
Shakespeare also absorbed andrefashioned Marlowes tragedies of
social aspiration and moral transgres-sion, which gives a
profoundly unclassical edginess and sense of displace-ment to his
central characters. His tragedies absorbed a whole range ofthinking
about imagination and probability, which can be traced to originsin
legal and rhetorical traditions, as well as to classical comedy.
Many ofthem show an interest in the nature of the will and of human
desires whichis at once philosophically sophisticated and nally
unresolvable to asingle philosophical position. That fuses with his
skill in fashioningspeeches of deliberation to suit particular
characters and occasions. SomeShakespearean tragedies explore how
human aspirations and desires areimaginatively projected on to the
world, and the multiple ways in whichthose desires do not quite
manage to turn into actions in quite the way theagent wanted. Some
present agents whose destruction seems to resonatewith the
surrounding world. Those features of the plays show
Shakespearesdeep debt to the tragedies of Seneca.
But these plays the products of rapid and deep thought, which
have eversince their composition provided occasions for deep
thought in their readersand audiences are by no means purely
cerebral. Shakespeares audiences
18 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
could, not far from the Globe, pay a penny or so to witness dogs
being tornapart by bears chained to posts. They could also see
public executions, whichwere often explicitly compared to tragedies
as when Chidiock Tichborne,about to be partially strangulated,
disembowelled while still alive and then cutup into segments by the
public hangman for his part in the Babington plot in1586, declared
Here you see a company of young men (and that Generositoo) playing
a woefull Tragedy.32 Tichbornes theatrical metaphors (com-pany,
Tragedy) were not simply conventional. Elizabethan tragedies
canmake the body scream in pain. When King Lear says I am bound /
Upon awheel of re, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead
(4.6.435)Tichbornes theatrical metaphors are inverted: a player
king lays claim inmetaphor to the physical torment which was
literally enacted close by on thescaffold of execution. Running
right through Shakespearean tragedy, fromthe mutilation of Lavinia
in Titus Andronicus to the blinding of Gloucester inKing Lear, and
from the sacricial slaughter of Julius Caesar, so
thoughtfullyplanned and yet so carnal to witness, to the butchery
of Coriolanus, there is aperplexing conjunction between raw
physicality and rened questions aboutmotive and agency. This
diversity of purpose and origin, in which physicalviolence meets
metaphysical speculation, is not simply an accidental elementof
Shakespearean tragedy. Diversity of purpose makes it thrilling, and
alsomakes it defy simple denition. WatchingHamlet is not a matter
of workingout what the Prince is thinking or feeling, as it was for
Bradley. Nor is it amatter of experiencing pity and terror in an
elevated form, as a neo-Aristotelian critic might wish. Nor is it
simply (as the most radical attemptto break free of character-based
readings of the play proposes)33 a play thatbroods on the material
fact of losing ones inheritance. The play is a quizzicalact of
conjunction and comprehension. An audience watches a player and
aplaywright pull together a whole range of divergent interests and
intellectualpreoccupations in order to make a kind of tragic drama
that seemed new. Theplay requires its audience, like Simon Forman
when he watchedMacbeth, tomake inferences about who has done what
and who knows what, and itpresses that process of making inferences
to the outer limit of uncertainty.Sometimes the play and the Prince
seem to sprawl off to meditate on deathand the destruction of the
body in ways that seem beyond the immediatepurpose; sometimes the
terror of death slows the action to a crawl; sometimesthe
collectivity of laughter weaves itself in with the shared
experience ofmortality, as when the gravediggers banter about time
and death and bodilydecay.
This diversity of purpose, origins and effects means that
responses to theplay are likely to be as various and numerous as
its audiences. A guilty king
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 19
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
watching it might give himself away by displaying what Sidney
called theulcers that are covered with tissue of his usurped state,
as Claudius doeswhen he calls for light in the middle of the
performance of The Mousetrap.A stoic like Horatio might see in it a
simple moral, a tale of accidentaljudgements, casual slaughters
(5.2.361). A pedant like Polonius might see init a mixture of
generic conventions. A self-improving man about town likeSamuel
Pepys might think that learning to recite To be or not to be was
avery ribbon in the cap of youth. Hamlet himself might hear in it
the untoldtale which he would tell if death did not carry him off.
Any mortal mightwitness in the play a primal panic in the face of
death, which is given anadditional impulse by the cloudy imperative
to revenge, to die and to go youknow not where. But then again an
apprentice butcher in the audiencemight think the climactic
sword-ght was really the best bit, and mightlaugh if his friend
were spattered by sheeps blood when Claudius is nallystabbed. These
plays are very nearly overburdened by the multiplicity oftheir
purposes and origins, and that is what makes them permanentlygreat
not as works of art consciously grounded in determinable
principles,but as hyper-principled, hyper-ambitious and endlessly
overdeterminedctions.
Notes
1. D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom, Ancient Literary
Criticism: ThePrincipal Texts in New Translations (Oxford
University Press, 1972), p. 97.
2. See Stephen Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics (London: Duckworth,
1986),pp. 184201 and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness:
Luck andEthics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge
University Press, 1986),pp. 37891.
3. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear,Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 22.
4. Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics, pp. 21522.5. Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, ed. and
trans.
T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. ii, pp.
1192237.6. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 18.7. Samuel Pepys,
The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham (London: Bell and
Hyman, 1985), pp. 281, 442.8. Ibid., p. 86.9. Arthur C. Kirsch,
A Caroline Commentary on the Drama,Modern Philology 66
(1969): 25661; 2578.10. Bodleian Ashmole MS 208, fol. 207,
transcribed in E. K. Chambers, William
Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford
University Press,1930), vol. iii, pp. 3378. Formans notes were
discovered by the forger JohnPayne Collier, and doubt has sometimes
been cast on their authenticity.
20 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
11. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in
Shakespeare andRenaissance Drama (Oxford University Press,
2007).
12. See Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgates Fall of Princes: Narrative
Tragedy in itsLiterary and Political Contexts (Oxford University
Press, 2005), especiallypp. 153218.
13. William Baldwin,TheMirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B.
Campbell (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1938), p. 345.
14. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford University
Press, 1986), p. 6:Like Macbeth, the bourgeoisie will become
entangled in its own excess, givingbirth to its own gravedigger
(the working class).
15. Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidneys The Defence of Poesy and
Selected RenaissanceLiterary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004), pp.
278.
16. See Scott Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics
of the EnglishReformation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2009).
17. For the arguments, see Blair Worden, Which PlayWas Performed
at the GlobeTheatre on 7 February 1601?, London Review of Books (12
July 2003): 224 andJason Scott-Warren, Was Elizabeth Richard II:
The Authenticity of LambardesConversation, Review of English
Studies (2012),
http://res.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/07/14/res.hgs062.full.pdf.
18. See RebeccaW. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political
Thought and Theater inthe English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1990).
19. Alexander, Renaissance Literary Criticism, p. 85.20. See
Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England
(Princeton
University Press, 1978).21. Alexander, Renaissance Literary
Criticism, pp. 456.22. See David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian
Donaldson, eds., The Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols. (Cambridge
University Press, 2012),vol. iv, p. 624.
23. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry
and theDevelopment of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley and London:
University ofCalifornia Press, 1978), pp. 10747.
24. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford University
Press, 1977),pp. 85118.
25. Samuel Johnson, Works, ed. Walter Jackson Bate, 23 vols.
(New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 19582010), vol. vii, pp.
689.
26. See further Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical
Comedy: the Inuence ofPlautus and Terence (Oxford University Press,
1994) and Alison Sharrock,Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and
Playfulness in Plautus and Terence(Cambridge University Press,
2009).
27. See Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical
Anthropology andShakespearean Selfhood (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press,2010) and Hutson, Invention of
Suspicion.
28. See Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan
Tradition: AngersPrivilege (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 1985), Robert
What is a Shakespearean tragedy? 21
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014
-
S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Inuence of
Seneca (OxfordUniversity Press, 1992).
29. For parallels see John William Cunliffe, The Inuence of
Seneca on ElizabethanTragedy: An Essay (London: Macmillan, 1893);
for a claim that these do notderive directly from Seneca see G. K.
Hunter, Dramatic Identities and CulturalTradition: Studies in
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Liverpool UniversityPress,
1978), pp. 15973. For the pro-Senecan backlash, see Emrys Jones,
TheOrigins of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.
26772.
30. Thomas Nashe, Works, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow and F. P.
Wilson, 4 vols.(Oxford University Press, 1958), vol. iii, pp.
31516.
31. Plutarchs Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans.
Thomas North, ed.George Wyndham, 6 vols. (London: D. Nutt, 1895),
vol. ii, p. 181.
32. Richard S.M. Hirsch, The Works of Chidiock Tichborne,
English LiteraryRenaissance 16 (1986): 30318; 313.
33. See Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge
University Press,2007).
Further reading
Altman, J. B.,The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical
Anthropology and ShakespeareanSelfhood (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Braden, Gordon, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition:
Angers Privilege(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press,
1985).
Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear,Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1957).
Bushnell, Rebecca W., Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought
and Theater in theEnglish Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1990).
de Grazia, Margreta, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge University
Press, 2007).Hutson, Lorna, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and
Mimesis in Shakespeare and
Renaissance Drama (Oxford University Press, 2007).Jones, Emrys,
The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1977).
Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1971).Kerrigan, J., Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon
(Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996).Miola, Robert, S., Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The
Inuence of Seneca
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).Smith, Emma, Shakespeares
Tragedies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
22 colin burrow
Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 128.103.224.4
on Tue Sep 02 14:07:57 BST
2014.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014