Lecturer Rhodri Lewis Examines Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Works

The book: Rhodri Lewis presents a new perspective on Shakespeare’s tragedies, exploring the complex reasons behind Shakespeare’s appreciation for the form and what factors have made his work the golden standard. In Shakespeare's Tragic Art (Princeton University Press) Lewis examines each of Shakespeare’s tragedies in detail, showing how each one demonstrates an immense capacity to capture the human experience. Readers will come to realize that these plays not only tell a story, but create a deeper understanding of what facets of life we find meaning in — illuminating a novel and informative side to Shakespeare, his tragedies, and his impact on literature as a whole.

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The author: Rhodri Lewis is a senior research scholar and lecturer in Princeton’s Department of English. His interests include literary, cultural, and intellectual histories of the 16th and 17th centuries. His previous books include Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness and Language, Mind and Nature.

Excerpt:

Chapter 1

For the past two and a half centuries, Shakespeare’s tragedies have enjoyed unrivaled prominence as a staple of theatrical repertories, school and university classrooms, and most corners of the literary imagination. Although this prominence has much to recommend it, at least one of its features should give us pause: the plays themselves have remarkably little in common with the convictions that lifted them up to greatness in the later 18th century, and that have helped to keep them there since. It is with these convictions — and with the stimuli from which they arose — that we need to begin.

In the hundred years after the British theaters reopened in 1660, Shakespeare’s tragedies were celebrated for their psychological insight and poetic abundance, but were often a theme of regret. Shakespeare failed to conform to the doctrines of tragic structure and decorum propagated by neoclassical theorists like René Rapin and Nicolas Boileau, and modeled by playwrights like Boileau’s friend, Jean Racine. This is why John Dryden tidied up Antony and Cleopatra into All for Love and Troilus and Cressida into Truth Found Too Late, why Thomas Rymer mocked Othello as a play whose lesson is “a warning to all good Wives that they look well to their Linnen,” and why Nahum Tate “rectifie[d] what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability” of King Lear — excising the Fool, and furnishing the plot with a happy ending in which Lear regains his throne and Cordelia survives to marry Edgar. Samuel Johnson was no slave to neoclassical nicety, but even he could do no more than give Shakespeare a pass for having lived at a time when “the rules of the ancients were known to so few,” “the publick judgment was unformed,” and there was “no example of such fame as might force him upon imitation, nor criticks of such authority as might restrain his extravagance.” Instead, Shakespeare relied on—and “indulged”—his “natural disposition.” For Johnson, this disposition was comic rather than tragic: comedy came to Shakespeare easily, but in tragedy his “performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour is more. The effusions of passion . . . are for the most part striking and energetick: but whenever he solicits his invention, or strains his faculties, the offspring of his throes is tumour [i.e., bombast], meanness, tediousness, and obscurity.” In Johnson’s estimation, the art and moral dignity of tragic drama require more than native talent and a fluid way with words.

Fashions change, and it was a combination of Shakespeare’s expansiveness and indifference to classically derived tragic norms that made him so attractive to a later generation of critics—principally those with German or English as a mother tongue, and who found in him an antidote to the universalizing and putatively hegemonic rationalism that they identified with French literary culture. For the Romantics and Idealists — starting with Herder, and arriving at A. C. Bradley via Goethe, the Schlegels, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and above all Hegel — the freedom that Shakespeare permitted himself in writing his tragedies enabled him to capture the spirit of a distinctively modern age. On their account, the ancient Greeks (principally Aeschylus and Sophocles) established that the stuff of tragedy was the conflict of goods (such as a collision between the duties imposed by love for one’s family and the need to obey the law), and that its purpose was to arrive at a synthesis through which these conflicts could to some degree be resolved. In their turn, these resolutions showed the dialectic of history moving forward. Shakespeare, by contrast, marks the point in history at which an older order of being (public, communal, external, possibly even sacred) gives way to the individualism of the modern age; he breaks from the classical model by writing tragedies in which conflicting goods are features of his characters’ psychological, emotional, and spiritual existences. Hamlet’s nobly contemplative soul disdains the compromises and corruptions demanded by action in the world, but the situation in which he finds himself requires decisively worldly action. His inability to choose one or other of these ways forward leads to his demise—apparently as a result of external events, in reality because his character has preordained it. Thus, the birth of modern individuality, and the pains with which modern individuality is unavoidably tangled up, can be observed. Acknowledging this situation invests the death of tragic protagonists like Hamlet, and even of obvious evildoers like Macbeth, with a powerfully redemptive force.

In case the previous paragraph too much resembles caricature, I should emphasize that although the Romantic Shakespeareans run too freely to abstraction, any student of Shakespearean tragedy owes them a great deal. For one thing, they affirmed the seriousness of Shakespeare’s tragic vision: its unflinching concern with questions of suffering, determinism (whether historical, providential, psychological, or some combination of the three), freedom, mortality, and moral ambiguity, along with its willingness to wonder both at the meaning of life and at the nature of historical change. We can also be grateful for the informed, inventive, sympathetic, and astute readings of the plays offered by Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Bradley. It is just that the Romantic-Idealist approach to tragedy, and therefore to Shakespeare, is essentially theological. More precisely, one of semi-secularized theology, in which giving a coherent description of a work of tragic art is of less significance than validating a hypostatized notion of “the tragic” — an ideology whose origins are found not in the writings of Sophocles or Shakespeare or any other playwright, but within the dialectic of history. Truth is historical-spiritual-philosophical, and comes first. Tragic drama, now a vehicle for “the tragic,” is brought into line to the best of the critic’s ability.

There is of course much to be gained from studying works of tragedy or of any other literary kind alongside history, philosophy, and theology. Moreover, there need not be a problem with writing history, philosophy, and theology through the medium of literary history or criticism: although critics of Shakespeare have long broken with Idealist theories of history, of character criticism, and of tragedy’s redemptive force, the practice of reading the plays as representations of historically defined value conflicts continues to the present day. We only get into difficulty when it comes to a Macbeth, a King Lear, or a Hamlet, all of which weave topics like history, philosophy, and theology into the fabric of their tragic art, and all of which admit these topics only in the service of that tragic art. I hope it won’t sound banal if I insist that in studying Shakespeare’s tragedies, the art has to come first. Not only because to do otherwise would be to risk mistaking a play for a theoretical dialogue (all plays are dialogic; not all dialogues are plays), but because it would be fundamentally to distort the ways in which Shakespeare’s tragic vision responds to the push and pull of history, and to the charge of many other phenomena besides. To put it another way, in diminishing the status of plot and structure, and by sidelining the experience of the plays as dramatic wholes, Romantic and post-Romantic approaches to Shakespeare’s tragedies risk doing them as much of a disservice as the neoclassical cultural cringe.

This is not a plea for keeping things simple or for literary-critical purity. Rather, the design of this book is to demonstrate that by attending as closely as possible to Shakespeare’s tragedies as works of dramatic art, we are able to behold an engagement with questions of history, philosophy, theology, politics, and the rest that is both more sustained and more unsettling than is commonly understood.

Writing about ancient Greek tragedy, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet argue that in “the development of what may be called a tragic consciousness, man and his action were presented, in tragedy’s own peculiar perspective, not as stable realities that could be placed, defined, and judged, but as problems, unanswerable questions, riddles whose double meanings remain enigmatic however often decoded.” On a similar tack, Bernard Williams observes that for minds like those of “Plato, Aristotle, Kant, [and] Hegel . . . the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that make sense of human life and human aspirations.” From the tragic perspective (as also, he notes, from that of a historian like Thucydides), we are left with no such sense, and are instead confronted by representations of human beings “dealing sensibly, foolishly, sometimes catastrophically, sometimes nobly, with a world that is only partially intelligible to human agency and in itself not necessarily well adjusted to ethical aspirations.”

Although Shakespeare wrote in a context that had very little in common with the Athens inhabited by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, he too believed that human beings struggle fully to comprehend the world of which they are a part. Unlike the ancient Athenians, the Elizabethans had access to Christianity as a totalizing account of the cosmos and of the place occupied by humankind within it; but as we shall see, within Shakespeare’s tragedies Christianity is granted little special significance. Rather than confronting his tragic protagonists with conflicting goods or forcing them to recognize conflicting impulses to the good within themselves, Shakespeare presents us with a world in which indeterminacy and ambiguity take on a starkly different cast. To adapt a line from V. S. Naipaul, it is not that Shakespeare’s tragic landscape is a space in which there is no right and no wrong, but that it is one in which, if right exists, it is all but indistinguishable—certainly, one with no kind of right that can be thought of as natural, divinely ordained, or metaphysically fixed. We need to tread carefully.

As we do when referring to “tragedy”: despite several shelves of books arguing otherwise, it has always resisted settled definition. Even if, as we must, we narrow our field of inquiry by excluding wars, plagues, and natural disasters (in Erasmus’s helpful analysis, “tragedies are different: in real disasters we do not need a character to grieve with us and join his tears with ours”), tragedy emerges as profoundly unstable — both as a practice and an idea. Aristotle’s precepts differ from those that can be abstracted from the surviving corpus of Greek tragedies; Greek tragedies differ from Roman ones, which in their turn differ from tragedy as understood by an author like Chaucer; all differ from the kinds of tragedies written for the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, which themselves differ — sometimes radically — from one another and from the early modern tragedies produced in Spain, France, Italy, the Low Countries, and the German-speaking lands. What happens to tragedy after the Romantic invention of “the tragic,” even at the fairly basic level of its growth to embrace the novel and other nondramatic forms of writing? Can tragedy have a place in capitalist, liberal, egalitarian, or otherwise modern societies? Did the abomination of the Holocaust leave tragedy dead in its wake? Do Artaud and Beckett and Miller and Pinter and Ionesco count? How does tragedy translate to music, opera, film, television, the new media, and the visual arts — if, indeed, it does? In one of the best books about Shakespearean tragedy written in the past half century, Stephen Booth puts it well. Given that works of tragic art are concerned with what happens beyond the rationally drawn boundaries and categories through which we seek to measure our lives, trying to reduce tragedy to one rational definition or another is destined to fail — and is positively dangerous for those seeking to interpret works of tragic art. Too often, “theories of tragedy keep us from facing tragedy itself.” Similar dangers afflict those who would write unified histories of tragedy as an idea or practice. As I see it, the best we can say is that tragedy, since first appearing circa 500 BCE, has meant many things to many different people. Although these meanings generally stand in discernible historical relation to one another, these historical relationships cannot be constrained to an orderly pattern, be it linear or stadial or cyclical. Before turning to Shakespeare’s own engagements with the tragic, my goal over the next several pages is simpler, if far from straightforward: better to understand “tragedy” as Shakespeare and his contemporaries encountered it.

Excerpted from Shakespeare’s Tragic Art. Copyright © 2024 by Rhodri Lewis. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Reviews:

"Ambitious and intriguing. . . .  An erudite and scholarly exploration of the Bard’s work." — Kirkus Reviews

“Lewis’s unflinching, learned 21st century account of Shakespearean tragedy has a clear eye for the plays’ comfortlessness even as his analyses make them sing. Move aside, A. C. Bradley.” — Emma Smith, Hertford College, University of Oxford