WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:

THE TRAGEDIES

PART 1
• SHAKESPEARE: THE TRAGEDIES
•
• Titus Andronicus
• Romeo and Juliet
• Julius Caesar
• Hamlet
• King Lear
• Macbeth
• Othello
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Coriolanus
• Timon of Athens
• Shakespeare was a professional playwright who wrote
mostly for the public stage. The form and style of his tragedies,
as of all his plays, were determined in part by the physical
conditions of the playhouses within which they were to be
acted, by the nature of the companies of actors that
performed them, the conventions of dramatic presentation
typical of his time, and to a lesser extent by the expectations
of those who went to see them. Early in his career, at least,
audiences expected plays to be written largely or wholly in
verse, and that most of this would be blank verse—a ten-
syllabled, unrhymed iambic line. For instance, Romeo’s “But
soft, what light from yonder window breaks” is such a line.
Shakespeare also uses prose – especially in his later work.
 • Titus Andronicus is the earliest and the least highly
regarded of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It is a revenge play. It
features the first character of colour in Shakespeare’s work
- the Moor Aaron. Unlike the noble Moor Othello of
Shakespeare’s later play, Aaron is represented as a villain of
the blackest dye. What we regard as RACISM is rampant in
the play.
•
• 2.Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of circumstance which means that its
tragic ending is not inevitable but is brought about by adverse
circumstances. Had circumstances been different, Romeo and Juliet might
have lived on – and who knows? – fallen out of love. Their death is
interpreted as a lesson to their parents, who have been involved in a feud
for a very long time – a lesson that they learn from the two teenagers,
who opted for love over feuding. Having lost their children, the parents
finally understand the futility and pointlessness of the feud. We thus have
a paradoxical situation of parents learning from their children, not the
other way about.
• The death of the young lovers is also seen as a victory –
over life and the inevitable changes in human
relationships that it brings: the lovers are young and very
much in love when they die. Had they been permitted to
live longer and become older, some of the purity of their
love would have been lost. It would have become tinged
with other feelings, such as jealousy and resentment, for
instance.
• 3. Julius Caesar is one of the so-called
Roman plays. Shakespeare based his plot
quite closely on the life of Caesar in the great
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by
the Greek-Roman historian Plutarch (46 CE –
120 CE) in a translation into English (via
French) of 1579 by Sir Thomas North,
dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. He was to
draw on this translation heavily also for his
other plays based on Roman history – Antony
and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.
• Despite its title, the main focus of the play
is not on Caesar but on the conspirators
Brutus and Cassius – particularly on the
former. The tragedy can be read as a study of
political power, the morality of political
rebellion – and even assassination. It asks a
crucial question: CAN ETHICS AND POLITICAL
FEASIBILITY BE EVER COMPATIBLE?
• Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth,
Othello and Antony and Cleopatra
are considered to be Shakespeare’s
great tragedies.
• 4.Hamlet is the greatest of the great. The
title character has turned into what we may
describe as a signature figure of European
culture – alongside with Don Quixote, Don
Juan, Robinson Crusoe and a few others.
• When we hear the name of Hamlet, the
image that comes into our heads is usually of
a good-looking, slim young man looking into
the empty eye sockets of a human skull—
Hamlet and Yorick, live young Prince and
dead clown—is an endlessly reproduced
emblem of the human condition.
• However, was Shakespeare’s Hamlet meant to be like our
own image of the prince? In the play, Gertrude, Hamlet’s own
mother, says that he is fat (does that mean overweight or is
it some kind of a metaphor with a different meaning?). Also:
we learn that Hamlet is 30 years old – and that was not a
particularly young age in Shakespeare’s own time (quite a lot
of people died much earlier!).
• We tend to view Hamlet as young, delicate-looking and
appealing because of the ways the play was interpreted
by European intellectuals, stage directors and actors from
the late eighteenth century onwards. It was in that
century that Shakespeare came to be seen as a European
playwright providing a type of drama different from the
Neoclassical plays of the French tradition. It was the
German appropriation of the play in particular that led to
a tendency to “modernize” Hamlet and, in some cases, to
present him as a sentimental young man in conformity
with the tastes of that period.
• Such a view of Hamlet is not completely
unjustified. If the play has one overriding
theme, it is that of how people react to
death. At its start, in the arresting opening
scene, we see the ghost of “the king that’s
dead.” Prince Hamlet’s father appears
horrifyingly but speechlessly at midnight on
the battlements of a castle in Denmark, so far
with no apparent purpose, to a group of men
who include Hamlet’s friend Horatio. Later in
the play, Hamlet speaks about death in his
famous soliloquy “To be or not to be.”
Practically all significant characters die in the
play.
• Reducing Shakespeare’s very complex play to one
dominant theme is not acceptable. Of course, Hamlet
can be compared with Shakespeare’s other tragedies
– and this might help us make sense of it!
• Considering all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, we can say that there are three main kinds
of tragic structure in them. There is, first, a social tragedy, with its roots in history,
concerned with the fall of princes. There is, second, a tragedy that deals with the
separation of lovers, the conflict of duty and passion, or the conflict of social and
personal (sexual or family) interests. And there is, third, a tragedy in which the hero is
removed from his social context and is compelled to search for a purely individual
identity.
• These plays might also be called the tragedy
of the killing of the father, the tragedy of the
sacrifice of the son, and the tragedy of the
isolation of the spirit.
• We may also adopt a somewhat different
classification and distinguish between
tragedies of order, such as Julius Caesar,
Macbeth, and Hamlet; tragedies of passion,
such as Romeo and Juliet and Antony and
Cleopatra; and tragedies of isolation, such as
King Lear, Othello, and Timon of Athens.
• These are not pigeonholes, only different areas of emphasis; most of the plays have aspects
that link them to all three groups.
• In each of Shakespeare’s three social tragedies, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet, we
have a tragic action based on three main character-groups. First is the order-figure: Julius
Caesar in that play; Duncan in Macbeth; Hamlet’s father; King Lear. He is killed – or, in Lear’s
case, incapacitated by his own abdication, by a rebel-figure or usurper: Brutus and the
other conspirators; Macbeth; Claudius; Edmund, Regan and Goneril in King Lear. Third
comes a revenger/avenger or a group of revengers/avengers (***Note the difference!!!):
Antony in Julius Caesar; Malcolm and Macduff in Macbeth; Hamlet in the eponymous play;
Edgar in King Lear.
• The revenger/avenger is primarily obsessed with killing the rebel-figure, but he also has the
important function of restoring something of the previous order.
• Central to Shakespeare’s tragedies is an
Elizabethan assumption about society as a
structure of personal authority, with the
ruler at its head, and a personal chain of
authority extending from the ruler down.
(Read the resource on the Elizabethan
WORLD PICTURE!) Everybody had a
superior, and this fact, negatively,
emphasized the limited and finite nature of
the human situation. Positively, the fact that
the ruler was an individual with a
personality was what enabled his subjects to
be individuals and to have personalities too.
• In plays where leadership does not depend wholly on hereditary succession, as in the
Roman plays and Hamlet, the choice of a successor, including Caesar’s preference for
Antony and Hamlet’s for Fortinbras, has a good deal of moral significance.
• One of the most familiar facts of Elizabethan
tragedy is that revenge/vengeance is so often
presented as a duty, a moral imperative, the
very call of conscience itself, and may still be
so even if the avenger is a ferocious sadist
who thoroughly enjoys what he is doing. The
sanctions of religion often endorse the
revenge, and the audience is usually assumed
to be sympathetic to it. If Desdemona had
been sleeping with Cassio, we (that is, most
people in most audiences including
Shakespeare’s) might still think that Othello’s
murder of her was wrong, but certainly
Othello would not have thought so, and the
other characters would have taken, not our
view, but the view of the tragic convention.
• Hamlet believes that “heaven was ordinant” in seeing to it that Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern were killed without “shriving-time allowed.” They were merely
serving the king whom they had every reason to believe was the rightful king,
but this time the convention is pulling in the opposite direction. Hamlet, again, is
less remorseful about killing Polonius than annoyed with Polonius for not being
Claudius and seems genuinely bewildered that Laertes should be hostile to him.
He can only realize, by an effort of which he is rather proud, that Laertes too
might want to avenge a father’s murder: “For, by the image of my cause, I see
Thee portraiture of his.” We should say that Hamlet at this point was
completely paranoid, and in fact Hamlet also blames his madness when
apologizing to Laertes for having exterminated his family. But the sanctity of
the greater revenge atones for everything: Laertes dies full of remorse for his
own treachery and flights of angels sing Hamlet to his rest.
• In the total action of Hamlet there are three concentric
tragic spheres, each with a murdered father and a
nemesis. At the centre is Polonius, murdered by accident
and avenged by his son. Around this comes the main
action of the play, where Hamlet’s father is murdered and
avenged by his son. Around this again comes the story of
the old and the young Fortinbras of Norway, the father
slain by Hamlet’s father, the son achieving by accident
what a successful revenge would have achieved, the
throne of Denmark. Of Fortinbras we know little except
that he will fight for anything; and so whatever the future
of Denmark may be, it is unlikely to be a peaceful future.
• The ending of the play Hamlet
thus seems to be a partly open one
since it stimulates us to speculate
about what might happen
next…The absence of complete
closure testifies to the complexity
of the play and its ability to take
hold of our imagination!