Shakespeare’s Tragedies

THE TRAGIC VISION Plays are traditionally divided into comedies and tragedies.
Tragedy has its origins in Greek drama, specifically in the plays of the Athenian dramatists
such as AESCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES,and EURIPIDES. The central concept is that a character is
afflicted by some kind of suffering, but preserves his or her dignity in the face of this
affliction. It is often pointed out that the tragic vision is incompatible with Christianity, in that
Christianity offers the good their reward in heaven. In tragedy the hero faces the worst the
world has to offer, but there is no sense of compensation beyond the present. It is,
furthermore, often argued that the most impressive quality of a tragedy, particularly of a
Shakespearean tragedy, is the way in which the main character articulates his sense of the
situation he finds himself in. Shakespeare’s four principal tragedies, Hamlet (1600), Othello
(1604), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1605-6), appear almost as a sequence in the period
before and after the death of Elizabeth. It would seem logical to argue, therefore, that they are
plays that are in a very direct way prompted by the political anxieties of this time. But if this
is the case, we might wonder why the plays can still so actively hold our interest today. One
argument is that these great plays are timeless, offering a particularly insightful vision of the
human condition. It is, however, perhaps more convincing to argue that, in the process of
engaging with contemporary political concerns, they also convey a sense of fundamental
tensions and movements in Western thinking, the legacy of which still affects us today.

Hamlet This is most obvious in relation to Hamlet, and possibly explains why this
is commonly regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest play.

PLOT Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, has married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, just a month
after the death of her husband. In addition, Claudius has claimed the throne, ignoring the
rights of his nephew. Hamlet discovers that his father was murdered by Claudius. After a
great deal of procrastination Hamlet kills Claudius; he is himself killed by Polonius’s son,
Laertes, who, unlike Hamlet, is an uncomplicated young man who immediately seeks revenge
against Hamlet for causing the death of his father and, indirectly, the death of his sister,
Ophelia.

APPROACHES We can see how the play deals with the issues that concerned the
Elizabethans so much, specifically questions of succession and political intrigue at court, but
very clearly there is a good deal more going on in the play. In order to make sense of the
experience of the work, critics used to latch on to the character of Hamlet, considering how he
deals with the moral dilemma he faces. Such an approach to the play had a great deal of
theatrical appeal, in that star actors were given an unrivalled opportunity to play the part of an
introspective, deep, troubled, and thoughtful man. The problem with such an approach,
however, is that it seems to reduce the significance of the play in that it makes it a little more
than a character study.

THEMES In these circumstances it makes more sense to search for the larger themes that
are implicit in the play, regarding Hamlet himself as simply a device that helps bring these
larger themes to life. These larger themes are, as suggested above, in part a matter of the
immediate political concerns of the Elizabethans, but what we can also see is the manner in
which a corrupt political situation is created at the court, and, rather than acting in accordance
with family or tribal loyalties, or (as, for example, was the case with Thomas More in the
reign of Henry VIII) in line with the dictates of religion, Hamlet as an individual has to make
decisions and choices about his participation in the political process. There is a way in which
the burden is placed on the individual in an unprecedented fashion. But there is even more
involved than this: the very notion of the individual, a concept which from this point on will
feature more and more in Western thinking, is perhaps realised and given substance for the
first time in Hamlet. There is a shift from a world view where everyone knows their place in a
scheme of things to a world view where people are not defined in advance in this kind of way.
And with this shift there comes a new emphasis on the interiority of human beings, on
their unknowable qualities as opposed to their known social positions. Hamlet himself
pretends to be mad, but the force of his acting is to throw into doubt any fixed conceptions
about the differences between reason and madness. Suddenly, and in particular in Hamlet
soliloquies, a new interior world is open up, a world which questions the old certainties of
understanding:

To be, or not to be – that is the question;

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows or outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep –
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
This flesh is heir to.
(Hamlet, III.i.56-63)
And suddenly, too, the language of tragedy has changed, with image following hard upon
image, creating an effect of speech confronting the edge of chaos, and of a speaker
confounded by contradictions, puzzles and uncertainties as well as pain, anger and grief.
Hamlet deals with a disrupted succession to the throne; an order that is desirable, of
one generation following the previous generation in an untroubled way (a fact that would be
underlined by Hamlet inheriting the throne from his father who is also called Hamlet), is at
odds with the actual state of affairs.

King Lear
THE TWO PLOTS King Lear also deals with a disrupted succession; the king decides to
abdicate in favour of his daughters, but this immediately produces an internecine 1 conflict
between Goneril and Regan, Lear having banished their youngest sister, Cordelia, for her
refusal to flatter him. She returns with an army to save her mad father, who has been driven
out of doors by the sisters; Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner. Cordelia is hanged and Lear
dies over her body. Running parallel to this plot is a second plot which sees the illegitimate
Edmund deceive his father Gloucester into banishing his legitimate son, Edgar; Edmund then
betrays Gloucester, who is punished by blinding for helping the mad Lear. Like Lear,
Gloucester dies of a broken heart, though reunited with Edgar.
Traditionally the play has been thought of as a kind of apocalyptic vision in which the two
plots serve to reinforce each other, with the characters acting as symbols of goodness and evil.
There is evidence for this view in the play, which has elements in common with both myth
and parable:
 the mad Lear and the blind Gloucester come to self-knowledge through suffering;
 the vicious cruelty of Goneril and Regan leads to their destruction, but this does
nothing to change the world or solve the problems of injustice and poverty the play
raises.

1
Internecineadj. – mutually destructive.
QUESTIONS