SHAKESPEAREAN

TRAGEDIESS
I. Why do we read/watch tragedies?
- Shakespearean tragedy challenges our belief that we read literature
or watch plays out of enjoyment.
- Why would we enjoy watching suffering and death? Does the
appeal of tragedy lie in its very sensationalism?
- Is the misery of tragedy cancelled by some good that it does?
- Is tragic suffering redemptive?
- And if so, is this good? By regarding suffering as redemptive, do
we evade constructive action in this world by tolerating suffering and
those who cause it?
- Or can suffering lead to improvement of mankind?
- Many tragic heroes learn important lessons through their
suffering;
- as audience we are able to learn what they learned without
having to suffer as he suffered.
- Is it this kind of growth that makes tragedy tolerable?
- And if so, what happens if the tragic hero doesn't grow,
as many don’t?
- Tragedy provokes so many questions and focuses on “big” issues:

- the 'problem of evil': if a benevolent and powerful force rules the

universe, how do we account for the existence of evil and
suffering?

- Tragedy – human effort to explore the problem of evil.

- It is typical of tragedy to explore questions rather than to

propound answers: tragedy is an interrogative genre, full of
questions.

 Tragedy's central question is the one that often springs to people's

lips when any terrible event occurs: why? why did this have to
happen?
II. CAUSES OF DISASTER

- the 'tragic flaw’ (defect) — a certain (moral) trait in the tragic

hero's character accounts for the terrible things that happen to
him and brings about his downfall . (tragic flaw: ambition, excessive
pride, cowardice, greed etc.)

- The notion of the tragic flaw >>> the ancient Greeks >>> hamartia
(a mistake in judgement leading to calamity) and hubris (excessive
pride, presumption or arrogance) that brings one to the attention of
the jealous gods, who are thereby provoked to inflict disaster.

In the Renaissance, the idea of hubris got entangled with notions of
guilty pride, giving the tragic flaw a moral tinge it hadn't had in
ancient Greek times.
 Overemphasis on the tragic flaw can narrow our vision of a
Shakespearean tragedy.

 For one thing, it blames the victim for his or her misery, and so
undercuts our sympathy, marring the pity that Aristotle thought
was one of tragedy's two major emotional effects (the other one was
terror).
 overemphasizing the tragic flaw also neglects the complexity of evil
in these plays.

Tragic disaster is brought on not only by flawed heroes like Titus

Andronicus, Othello, Hamlet, and Lear, but also by villains like Aaron
in Titus Andronicus, Iago in Othello, Claudius in Hamlet.
- deliberate villainy and human malice often work against the
protagonist. Sometimes rather than being particularized in one
villain, human malice is distributed among members of a group,
such as the feuding factions in Romeo and Juliet.

 Another cause of disaster in tragedies is what we might loosely

call Fate—the gods, the stars, the Goddess Fortune, chance,
accident—all forces beyond the protagonist's control.

 the original meaning of 'disaster' was 'under the malign influence

of the stars’.
 Today we have different notions of deterministic forces outside a
person's control—the class system, global capitalism, oppressive
governments, even the capricious stock market that can make or
break an individual >>> sense of helplessness and lack of personal
control over events that the Renaissance called Fate.

 Chance and accident >> pervasive in tragedy - as when a

messenger detained in a plague quarantine can't deliver his crucial
message telling Romeo that Juliet isn't really dead.
 But the idea of a tragic flaw makes sense at least in that it
attributes some blame to the protagonist.

 Aristotle declared that tragedy involves unmerited misfortune.

 Shakespeare makes his protagonists more and more

responsible for their own catastrophes >>> from the largely
innocent Romeo and Juliet to heroes more clearly responsible for
setting in motion the forces that destroy them (King Lear, Antony
and Cleopatra), occasionally even casting outright villains as heroes
(the Macbeths).
 But can we sympathize with a tragic hero who is an outright
criminal?

 Aristotle thought we couldn't. Shakespeare, apparently, thought we

could.

Across his ten tragedies, Shakespeare makes increasing demands on

audience sympathy, choosing as his later tragic heroes—and
therefore inviting some measure of audience identification with —
such tragic figures as the murderous Macbeths; the stubborn, self-
centred old King Lear;

 How could he have expected audience empathy with such

characters?
III. TRAGIC SCAPEGOATS

 One theory is that tragic heroes serve as scapegoats: the ills of a

whole society, heaped on their shoulders, seem to disappear
magically when the protagonists are killed.

 Romeo and Juliet are the innocent sacrifice familiar to Greek

tragedy.

 The deaths of Romeo and Juliet, though not a religious rite as in

Greek tragedy, have a kind of religio-magical effect: the feud ends,
and Verona is saved.
 Some think that scapegoats must be innocent, but in Renaissance
England — the victim is often spotted or tainted in some way.

 Overemphasis on guilt is distorting: the killing of a scapegoat

often, in Shakespeare, cures evils much more extensive than can be
accounted for by any flaw in the scapegoated protagonist himself.

 At the end of a tragedy or a history play with a 'tragic ending',

society's troubles are judged to be cured when the offending
protagonist is dead (Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Richard III);

 but a thinking, reflective audience is often left uneasy by this

blaming of the victim.
 These plays often leave the impression that the troubles
temporarily cured by sacrificing a scapegoat are deeply rooted in
their society and will recur.

Scapegoating is a troubling phenomenon >>> sense of its futility in

the long run.

 our recognition that scapegoating is only a piece of wishful

thinking, of magical thinking >> helps us sympathize with even a
guilty protagonist, whose disaster most often outweighs his or her
offence.

We forgive because the protagonist is (in King Lear's words) 'more
sinned against than sinning’.
 forgiveness – Christian virtue >> Elizabethan audience (i.e. God
commanded us to forgive, and because we were sinners too, and
we shouldn't judge.)

 Shakespeare's radical demand >>> that we sympathize, that we

understand even a protagonist who brought all this on himself >>>
ultimately the demand of a Christian culture.
IV. TRAGEDY AND OTHER GENRES

 Tragedy as a genre comes from classical Greece and Rome.

 Elizabethan playwrights >>> drew a lot on Roman tragic writer

SENECA >>> for such sensational elements as bloodiness, revenge,
ghosts, prophecies, and the supernatural.

 Seneca's plots were bloodthirsty, but he always kept the gore

offstage and left bloody violence to be described by a messenger.
 Shakespeare - violence on stage — Queen Margaret stabbing a
child to death in Henry VI Part Two, Gloucester's two eyes being
gouged out (King Lear, 3.7.86), Macbeth's bleeding severed head
stuck up on a pole.

 Renaissance people >>> a tolerance (or even a taste) for

sensational gore from watching public executions;

 GORE was a hallmark of tragedy.

 Shakespearean tragedy differs from comedy in several significant
ways:

• unhappy ending,
• more intense degree of suffering and evil,
• its more fully developed protagonists,
• the higher social class of its major characters,
• a higher percentage of blank verse
• usually male-oriented.

 Most tragic heroes are sterile in having no children: Hamlet tells

his potential bride to become a nun; Othello and Desdemona,
Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, and probably the Macbeths die
childless.
 Tragedy differs from history plays >>> emphasizing the private
person, where histories emphasize the public person: even when
tragic heroes are politically powerful, tragedies are more interested
in their moral, ethical, and emotional dimensions than in their
political dimension.

 tragedy's focus on the private person >> tragic heroes are in some
way alienated from their public, political roles.

Hamlet has not succeeded his father as king; Lear has resigned his
kingdom; the Macbeths have usurped the crown;
 while comedies bring people together in community, the tragic
hero grows increasingly isolated —not only from the public life to
which his high rank entitles him, but from the people closest to him.

 Hamlet becomes disgusted with his mother and estranged from

Ophelia.
V. THE TRAGIC HERO

 isolation is a prelude to death

 some of Shakespeare's most individualized characters.

Shakespeare's age newly valued, but was also suspicious of,

idiosyncratic and individualized personality, and therefore also
situated it in villains like Iago in Othello.

 a tragic figure is cut off from community >>> tragedy affirms >>>
the irreplaceable, unique human life.
 The tragic hero is individualized by complexity of
personality — Hamlet is by turns sensitive and brutal,
lyrical and sarcastic, a faithful friend to Horatio and a fatal
friend to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; he is a scholar,
fencer, soldier, lover, poet, theatre buff, joker, prince. (see
Ophelia’s speech)

 His speech is distinctive. He asks lots of questions and he

rapidly repeats words and phrases: 'Very like, very like';
'Thrift, thrift, Horatio’;
 Tragic figures are also given individualized treatment in that each
tragedy seems designed for the hero, or vice versa: each hero is
placed in the tragic circumstances with which he is least equipped
to cope, almost like a test (which, tragically, he always fails).

 one can evade trouble in a comedy, where running away is not

considered reprehensible (the young lovers in A Midsummer Night's
Dream escape from danger or intolerable situations simply by running
away to a forest . )

 But most tragic figures don't even consider running away: they
march head-on into catastrophe.

 their inability to escape >>> partly attributable to their inflexible

personalities; yet, it also reflects circumstances beyond their
control.
 secondary characters – also fall victims to tragedy's general
catastrophe—did Paris in Romeo and Juliet, or Ophelia in Hamlet , or
Lady Macduff in Macbeth deserve to die?

There is no balance and reasonableness about what happens in

tragedy >> that, in large part, is what makes it tragic >>> this is hard
to accept, and it makes tragedies painful to read and to watch.
 People often resist this unfair tragic world, trying to make it fair,
by finding some fault with the tragic characters >> depicting
Desdemona as an undutiful daughter and rather flirty with Cassio,
Romeo and Juliet as impatient etc.

 Overemphasis on the tragic flaw (neglecting the pervasive role of

malice, of an unjust society, chance, accident, and pure bad luck in
nearly every tragedy) >>>> part of the desire to find the hero guilty
of something serious enough to merit extreme suffering and
death, and thus to preserve our sense that life is fair.

But….is this fair?