Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

Through our discussion of the history plays you will have already encountered a modern critical movement known as new historicism. Stephen Greenblatt began his book, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford, 1988) with the sentence ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead.’ No sooner, however, do you express the desire to engage with the past than your present ‘voice’ becomes entangled with those with whom you wish to converse. This is, perhaps, one of the paradoxes of the new historicist literary critical movement of the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first: the history it seeks to uncover to elucidate an understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is one being explored from the perspective of ‘the present’, and commentators impose their present sense of pattern and values on the past. But if this is so for us, it was also the case for Shakespeare, as we have seen in his history plays and indeed also in his tragedies, where he sees the past through the lens of his (and his culture’s) current concerns.

Aristotle

The title pages of the early editions of some of Shakespeare’s tragedies refer to them as ‘tragical histories’. To understand the nature of tragedy it is useful to keep in mind the paradox of reading history or, indeed, of reading critics reading history. Traditionally, critics, in attempting to define tragedy, have tended to go back to Aristotle’s Poetics and his definition of tragedy and particularly his notion of catharsis.

‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions.’

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (1996: 10). Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Note: the Greek word katharsis is here translated as ‘purification’. In other translations the word ‘purgation’ is preferred.)

So let us follow tradition by looking at traditional models but then proceed to examine the way in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics have challenged particularly Aristotle’s applicability to Shakespearean tragedy. It is for you to decide for yourself, from this understanding, how you will approach, in particular, the four major Shakespearean tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth.

The traditional approach to tragedy begins by viewing the drama as a ‘conflict’ and the plot of the play as a ‘knot’, which the dramatic narrative proceeds to unravel. You may recall Viola’s words in the comedy Twelfth Night: ‘O time, thou must untangle this, not I,/It is too hard a knot for me t’untie’ (2.3.40–41).

Key idea

The ‘time’ it takes to unravel the problems of the play becomes the play’s process, in comedy and especially tragedy. The structure of tragedy, however, has also traditionally been seen as a pyramid, and is sometimes referred to as ‘Freytag’s pyramid’ after the scholar Gustav Freytag (1816–95). This involves the following progression: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Catastrophe.

Early in his career, Shakespeare was influenced in writing tragedy by the Latin author Seneca (d. CE 65). Titus Andronicus (1591–2) is often referred to as ‘Senecan’ because of its excessive violence, but Seneca’s plays were written not to be acted but to be read, usually out loud. Shakespeare may not have been quite as familiar with the Greek tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. Nevertheless, the main plot of Hamlet, to take a case in point, can be related to the classical structure that is described by Freytag’s pyramid. In such a reading, the climax of the play is at the turning point, Act 3, Scene 3, when Hamlet fails to kill Claudius at prayer. The plot rises to this point and then falls back towards multiple deaths that occur in Act 5. The problem with such a definition, coming from an understanding of classical drama, however, is that it can come under strain tied to another Aristotelian feature, the notion of the three Unities, which we considered in our discussion of comedy. The Unities are of time (the action should take place in a single day); of place (the action should be in a single location); and of plot (there should be just a single plot or ‘action’).

Clearly, Hamlet does not conform to the Unities, and neither do Shakespeare’s other tragedies. Shakespeare is not alone in this since, although they differ from each other in all sorts of ways, other Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies also violate the Unities, as well as incorporating comic elements into their structures. This mixture of styles, characteristic of Elizabethan popular theatre, was something to which Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) objected in his famous essay The Apologie for Poetrie (or Defence of Poesie), written c.1580 and published under the two different titles in 1595.

Spotlight

Traditionally, Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy has been defined as consisting of three types:

✽The first is de casibus tragedy, which shows the rise and fall of a great individual (as seen, for example, in the figure of Mortimer in Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II (1592) and, as we have earlier considered, Richard in Shakespeare’s Richard III).

✽The second is revenge tragedy, sometimes also called the ‘tragedy of blood’. This places an individual within a corrupt society failing to find justice through legal or religious institutions. See, for example, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1589–92) or John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599–1601).

✽The third is domestic tragedy, as exemplified in plays such as the anonymous Arden of Faversham (c.1592), which deals with issues that are implicitly rather than explicitly political but nevertheless have some links with the development and progress of the tragic plays we are to discuss.

Othello is often regarded as a ‘domestic’ tragedy and King Lear demonstrates a domesticity that has far-reaching public and hence political implications. Othello and King Lear, however, would be reduced by the categorization ‘domestic tragedy’, as would Hamlet by being termed merely a ‘revenge tragedy’ or Macbeth as a ‘de casibus tragedy’. Each is much more complex than such pigeonholing allows, and each is greater in reputation than any such reductive definition can adequately contain.

The influence of A. C. Bradley

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, written before the birth of Christ, was based on his experience of Greek tragedy and its affinity with ancient Greek religion. Whereas Aristotle saw comedy as being an ‘imitation of inferior people’, he saw tragedy as being an ‘imitation of persons better than the average man’. He believed, nevertheless, that ‘character’ was subordinate to ‘action’. The Romantic critics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, privileged the personality of the tragic protagonist – Coleridge, for example, declared he ‘had a smack of Hamlet’ within his own personality.

In doing so, they helped spawn a hybrid Aristotelian view influencing the way in which the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perceived Shakespearean tragedy. One of the most influential of the early twentieth-century critics was A. C. Bradley (1851–1935), whose book Shakespearean Tragedy first appeared in 1904 and continues to influence our contemporary understanding of tragedy, although from the 1930s onwards it has sparked controversy.

Bradley’s theory of tragedy owed much to the nineteenth-century philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), whose model of conflict and resolution bore certain similarities to the Aristotelian theory of tragic catharsis, variously understood as ‘purgation’ or ‘purification’. This concept refers to the emotional state in which the audience finds itself at the completion of the tragic action. Through the play, feelings of pity and terror are created in the spectators and at the end these emotions and feelings are released, purged, purified and brought back into balance. This is tragic catharsis. C. L. Barber (1959), as we saw earlier, detected something similar happening in comedy when, in the conclusions of the plays, he holds that there is a ‘release through clarification’. Tragic catharsis can allow the audience to feel elated at what they have witnessed while at the same time relieved that they experienced the tragedy vicariously through the agency of the fate of the protagonist.

The tragic protagonist

The protagonist, the main character in the play, is usually someone of high rank who suffers a reversal of fortune, sometimes brought about by his own pride, hubris, and his refusal to compromise. He is blind to the consequences of his pride and his actions lead to his downfall, but towards the end of the play there is the moment of recognition, anagnorisis, in which the blindness is lifted and he achieves a modicum of self-knowledge. That, however, comes too late for him to avoid the consequences of his actions. Thus, in the face of defeat, the protagonist reveals admirable human qualities. This led Bradley to lament the inconsolable ‘waste’ that we are left with at the end of the tragic action.

THE REACTION TO BRADLEY

In 1933 L. C. Knights published an essay, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, which challenged some of Bradley’s assumptions. Knights exposed in the very title of the essay the absurdity of thinking that Shakespeare’s characters have an independent and individual life outside the confines of the play. He insisted on a close examination and appreciation of the language of the plays. Later, in Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (1937), influenced by the social historian R. H. Tawney, Knights widened this critical emphasis to take into account historical, social and political issues. This began a shift away from critical attitudes founded on ‘character’, which had owed much to the influence of the nineteenth-century novel, to an appreciation of much wider issues that need to be considered.

Text and performance

If we return to Aristotle, he tells us that it is ‘the events, i.e. the elements of plots, that are most important in tragedy’ and that plot or ‘action is the most important thing of all’. As early as 1933, E. E. Stoll, in Art and Artifice in Shakespeare, identified ‘stock characters’ in Elizabethan drama, an observation taken further by Bernard Spivack in his Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958). (See Chapters 13 and 18.) Spivak established a link between the figure of Richard III and Iago in Othello, suggesting that they had their origins within the tradition of the Vice figure of the medieval morality plays. From various viewpoints, other critics such as David Bevington and Robert Weimann explored the ways in which aspects of a popular tradition in medieval drama influenced Shakespeare’s plays, while O. B. Hardison Jnr focused on the influence of Christian liturgy on medieval drama itself and thereby offered an alternative historical foundation for the development of Elizabethan drama.

Critical debate towards the end of the twentieth century was to intensify. A group of critics led by J. L. Styan, Stanley Wells and John Russell Brown, who owed much to the influence of the theatre director Harley Granville-Barker earlier in the century, began to look at the plays not as literary artefacts but as blueprints for performance; indeed, they were highly influential on critics such as myself in the development of my Text and Performance series of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Text and Performance critics tried to reconcile literary critical studies with the insistence that the plays only really come fully to life in the theatre where they are performed.

Meaning by Shakespeare

If tragedy is concerned with action rather than character, that action may be informed and, indeed, determined by social and political contexts beyond the text of the play, and these traces of the contexts maybe recovered either through critical evaluation or recognized in performance. In 1992 Terence Hawkes, in Meaning by Shakespeare, argued that modern scholars impose their own meanings on Shakespeare without fully realizing what they are doing. Thus critics imposed their ideologies upon the texts without a full understanding, or indeed acknowledgement, of how they were being influenced.

The landscape of critical opinion was further informed by fundamental issues relating to the notion of tragedy itself. While new historicism saw the need to locate dramatic texts in the culture of their historical moment as a means of locating historical pressures, the cultural materialists, drawing on a long dissident tradition of Marxist and socialist thought, questioned the fundamental emphasis on character in tragedy, preferring the post-structuralist category of ‘subjectivity’ and the complex social pressures within which it was produced. Following on from the Marxist rejection of the notion of the bourgeois ‘individual’ which had informed much of the characterization of the tragic protagonist since the end of the eighteenth century, emphasis now came to be placed upon how the protagonist was ‘produced’.

In this regard, the writings of theatre dramatists and theoreticians such as Bertolt Brecht, who, as we saw in Chapter 9, challenged the Aristotelian methods implicit in theatre production, became highly influential on critical attitudes in the last decades of the twentieth century. His distinction between Aristotelian ‘Dramatic Theatre’ and his own ‘Epic Theatre’ took the emphasis away from the individual at the centre of the play, placing the drama directly within a social and political dimension, preferring, thereby, to expose the ways in which the tragic protagonists were produced by the political situation in which they find themselves. Brecht was an enthusiastic aficionado of Elizabethan drama, emphasizing in particular the ways in which these plays demonstrated a theatrical self-consciousness that ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’ in the theatres sought to disguise.

The individual and society

The concept of the ‘individual’, however, had evolved not so much from Aristotle as from differing Christian concepts of the self, which some critics strongly challenged. Jonathan Dollimore, in Radical Tragedy [1984/1989: 153], insisted on a Marxist materialist interpretation of the individual: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’ In the late 1940s and 1950s Brecht had challenged what he took to be Aristotelian theatre and its alleged capacity to draw the spectator into identifying with the tragic protagonist at the expense of forsaking her/his critical distance from the action. In the 1930s Antonin Artaud augmented this challenge to accepted modes of appreciation, developing the concept of the Theatre of Cruelty:

‘[The Theatre of Cruelty is] theatre’s need to steep itself in the wellsprings of infinitely stirring and sensitive poetry, to reach the furthest removed, the most backward and inattentive part of the audience, achieved by a return to ancient primal Myths, not through the script but the production, will not be solely required to incarnate and particularly to bring these ancient conflicts up to date. That is to say, the themes will be transferred straight on to the stage but incarnated in moves, expressions and gestures, before gushing out in words. In this way we can repudiate theatre’s superstition concerning the script and the author’s autocracy.’

Artaud, A., ‘The Theatre of Cruelty: Second Manifesto’ (1938), The Theatre and Its Double (1970: 82–3), trans. Victor Corti. London: Calder & Boyars

Artaud’s desire to distance the autocracy of the author and ‘repudiate theatre’s superstition concerning the script’ in the late 1930s was the complete opposite of the bardolatory of the nineteenth-century Romantic Movement. His desire to bring the ancient myths of classical plays, for example, ‘up to date’ presaged a movement in Shakespearean study and performance in the 1960s and 1970s, with the writings, for example, of Jan Kott in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1967) and the practice of eminent and influential British theatre directors, most notably Peter Brook (see below).

Tragedy and catharsis

The Aristotelian concept of tragedy was subsequently attacked by the South American dramatic theorist Augusto Boal (Theater of the Oppressed, 1974, trans. 1979), who saw in it a coercive mechanism that was specifically designed historically to ensure political harmony in a culture sustained by slavery. Boal’s analysis could also be applied to any form of drama that demanded a return to social and emotional ‘balance’. The concept of hamartia, or the protagonist’s tragic flaw, and the retribution it provokes, is cited by Boal as a method of reinforcement of social control. In his view, tragedy creates a means of sacrificing the protagonist in order to guarantee conformity to the prevailing ethos. Thus the whole notion of catharsis as an emotional rebalancing of purgation and purification is critically questioned as being both coercive and a reaffirmation of the legitimacy of a dominant political force.

Aristotle’s concept of tragedy in the Poetics nevertheless remains an important document from which interpretations concerning tragedy and Shakespeare’s tragedies derive, but since the latter years of the twentieth century the challenges made to it have opened up debate and led to various kinds of theatrical experimentation. Much modern critical opinion respects the fact that, when we look for meanings in Shakespeare, we may actually be consciously or unconsciously imposing our own meanings upon him from our various ideologically informed viewpoints. Shakespeare’s tragedies not only survive such debates but they gain from them, in the effectiveness of contemporary criticism and production.

A cruel play for cruel ages: Titus Andronicus

In 1955 the renowned British director Peter Brook revived Shakespeare’s early tragedy Titus Andronicus, with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, in an uncompromising, violent production at Stratford-upon-Avon, which had some of the audience fainting at the barbarity displayed. It is important for you to recall that Elizabethan England was a violent place. In the time of Shakespeare, for example, criminals and religious dissenters, labelled as traitors, were executed as a public spectacle in the cruellest of ways – first hung, then taken down and, while still alive, castrated, their bowels drawn from them and lastly their heart removed still beating and shown to them as they died. They were then beheaded and quartered, with their limbs being sent to various parts of the country, not only as a warning to others but also to ensure that, on the day of Christian resurrection, they would find it hard to rise from the dead.

These Tyburn executions were public spectacles, in which enterprising local home owners rented out seats and viewing positions, while others sold refreshments. (See MacGregor, N. [2012] and Crawforth, H., Dustager, S., Young, J. [2015].) John Foxe’s (1516–87) Acts and Monuments (1563), published frequently during Shakespeare’s lifetime and known as ‘Book of Martyrs’, records the earlier horrific Protestant martyrdoms during the reign (1553–8) of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor.

The ‘revenge tragedy’ Titus Andronicus depicts the horrific rape and mutilation of Lavinia by Demetrius and Chiron, sons of the Goth queen Tamora, who becomes the wife of the Roman Emperor Saturninus. The action of the play culminates in Titus killing his violently abused and desecrated daughter ‘and thy shame (die) with thee’. His final act of revenge is to serve Tamora’s dead sons, who defiled Lavinia, in a pie to be eaten by Tamora and the Emperor before he then slays the Empress. He in turn is killed by the Emperor Saturninus. This violent play written in a violent age was adapted by Brook for audiences only too aware of the Nazi barbarities in the Second World War, and also of the contemporary threats of the Cold War.

The violent atrocities of the play itself were popular with its first Elizabethan audiences, some of whom, no doubt, would have watched public executions. In one sense it was an easier play with which to challenge traditional notions of tragedy in the theatre, but Brook’s famous production signalled a brave attempt to defy convention. Aristotelian catharsis was never a part of the ending of this play but Brook was later to produce a King Lear (1962–4) where the focus, too, was on cruelty, bleakness and contemporary relevance. His assistant director, Charles Marowitz, was subsequently to ‘deconstruct’ Shakespeare’s plays, shattering them like a ‘precious vase’ in order to rebuild them for modern audiences because he thought that they had become too familiar with them (and therefore too complacent about them).

Whether, however, this bloody revenge play by Shakespeare was merely gratuitous and audience pleasing or a part of a process of learning his craft by imitating Seneca is still a matter for debate. Further modern productions have continued to expose the underlying brutality and violence of ‘civilized’ society itself. Perhaps in that, however, they were beginning to realize Shakespeare’s vision, even at this early stage in his career, of the terrors present within historical, political regimes and within the society ruled over by the Tudor dynasty.