Notebook 9

Located in the NFF, 1991, box 22, Notebook 9 falls into three parts. The first thirty-three numbered pages are mostly indecipherable, cancelled drafting for the Massey Lectures that became The Educated Imagination, along with fragmentary notes on miscellaneous topics; all of this material has been omitted from the Collected Works except for three initial lists that attempt a classification of Shakespearean comedies and tragedies. Following these are 46 pages of notes for the Bampton Lectures that were turned into A Natural Perspective, numbered separately by Frye with the prefix “Sh.” Finally, fifty-six pages of notes for the Alexander Lectures, which became Fools of Time, are numbered with the prefix “Al.” The Bampton Lecture material (paragraphs 1–177) dates from 1963, as indicated by the list of projects in paragraph 4, prior to the delivery of the lectures in November 1963. Paragraphs 178–335 were composed prior to the delivery of the Alexander Lectures in March 1966. Braces throughout represent Frye’s brackets; these seem to have been added at a later point, most likely to indicate material incorporated, or to be incorporated, into the lectures. Roman numerals above many paragraphs were probably added later as well; they indicate the lecture (or chapter) to which the material belongs.

[1]	Sea Comedies: CE,1 TN, MV, P, T	Castle Tragedies: O, H, TC
	Forest Comedies: TGV, MND, AYL, MW, (Cy), (WT)	Heath Tragedies: L, M, TAth
	Humor Comedies: LL, TS, MA
	TC: the walled Troy’s there P
	TAth: the heath Troy’s there Cy
[2]	JC2 M H
	Co AC TC
	KL O TAth
[3]	sea3 CE TN MV P	Ur. [Urizen]
	forest TG, MND, AYL, MW	Luv. [Luvah]
	humor LL TS MA AW MM	Th. [Tharmas]

[4] 1963

Yeats Essay. Done

4 Milton Lectures

4 Shakespeare Lectures

Talk at the MLA. Done4

[5] The Bamptons Are About Shakespeare

[6] CE & the water imagery: drops falling into the sea. Apuleius imagery.5

[7] Red & white in the history plays: the malignant principle carried through Joan of Arc. PT & VA.

[8] I have decided, perhaps not permanently but certainly for the time being, to have the Bampton Lectures on Shakespeare. Reasons:

1) It gives me a specific topic, & my time is limited.

2) I don’t “possess” Shakespeare, but I do know him, & my papers about him have been fairly successful.

3) Biblical typology is out for this fall (no Hebrew); Romantic poetry is out; general theory is running pretty thin.

4) Shakespeare is the logical basis for 1 [Tragicomedy], as Milton is for L [Liberal].

5) A book on Shakespeare by me, if successful, would, appearing in 1964, make news & make money.6 The latter is the best motivation for academic writing ever discovered, as it creates exactly the right blend of detachment & concern.

[9] Now: the natural tendency, & a very healthy one, for critics of Shakespeare is to talk specifically about individual plays. But what I’d like to do is the kind of slopping-over job, on a huge scale, that I did (rather too much of for my own comfort: that was a prodigal & reckless paper) in my WT essay.7 The problem is this: Dante & Milton[,] because they are major poets, go straight to the archetypal centre of Western culture—in CH [Balzac’s Comèdie Humaine], of the human imagination. Shakespeare just writes one play after another; seems to have no archetypal interests whatever. There’s a strong Arnold-Eliot feeling that he’s a dangerous influence, & the reason for the feeling may be not just that his language is too clever but that he’s too empirically minded, & encourages our novelists & poets to think in terms of the random subject.

[10] What I’d like to do is study the inter-connecting imagery, ideas, characterizations & structural principles of the plays in such a way as to bring out the archetypal centre. The common-maker, as Priestley would call it.8 (This kind of irony is frequent in what Yeats would call my Body of Fate). If completely successful, it would be the best single volume on Shakespeare ever written.

[11] 10 autos (i.e. histories), 9 tragedies, 4 ironies (TC, T Ath, AW, MM), 10 comedies, 4 masques (i.e. romances). That’s five, & I seem to keep thinking of five—one extra for Denver, maybe. I suppose it would be logical to start with comedy & romance/simply because I know & like them best, but maybe the generic circle isn’t the best way to tackle this problem.

[12] Some of the stuff I’ve been collecting, apart from its own use for further theoretical work {incidentally, what I’ve got in the other notebook9 is really the germ of A [Anticlimax]: symposium, Utopia, metaphorical basis of thought & quizzical attitude to religion} would still be useful. The question of “play” itself, of course, & the structure as the impersonal centre vs. the direct message of content, may have something to do with Shakespeare’s extraordinary power of acceptance. His notions of patriotism, social hierarchy, & what constitutes a joke, are those of his audience: he seems to have no power of detachment—he may work through to it, but he sure as hell doesn’t start with it.

[13] What I should start with are the histories, the great double tetralogy using my H8 stuff as the epilogue. Or with the ironies: if I don’t insist on my paranoid canon-cracker notion I might do the series on four plays: (a) TC, MM, AW, TAth (b) TC, Lear, TAth, Cy* (c) TC, MND,10 Cy, R2.1 start with TC because of my notion that it starts a parallel series of British (H, L, M) & Roman (JC, AC, Co) plays (expanded to TAth by Plutarch) reconciled in Cy,11 which ought to turn up somewhere.

* This sequence particularly interests me: perhaps Cy might slop over into P, which is a rewritten version of CE.

[14]                     I.

The comedy paper might well open with my Iliad & Odyssey point.12 Actually I had better begin with comedy, simply because it’s easiest for me to see from there whether I can do my paranoid scheme or not. (Why the hell should it be paranoid? Surely there’s objective evidence by now that I do this sort of thing pretty well). The comedies take in all the romances & half the ironies, besides.

[15]                     II.

I should transfer my one idea about Jonson.13 One play that we know failed to please its audience was Jonson’s New Inn: we know this because its failure was so highly publicized by Jonson himself. There is something very disarming about Jonson’s attempts, as in The Magnetic Lady, to instruct his audience in the art of liking Ben Jonson,14 & in his determination to revenge himself, like Puff in Sheridan’s Critic, by saying “I’ll print it, every word.”15 But the arts of mousike are not the arts of techne.16 Parts that actors can get their teeth into are a product of wit, & wit is a product of rhythm & pacing. The characterization in The New Inn is by no means incompetent. But expertise in structure is a progressive unfolding of disguise, like unveiling a monument, & structure is a metaphor for the arts of techne. The fact that it’s rhythm & pacing that keeps a play on the boards, not structure, is the reason why an opera can survive by its music alone (Handel’s Rodelinde [Rodelinda]. In music, too, tremendous structural expertise may exist on the highest level (Bach) or on no level in particular (look up Raimondi).17

[16]

We should not overlook the anti-realism in Shakespeare: the deliberate anachronisms, for example. The historical hodge-podge that Samuel Johnson so despised in Cymbeline might have occurred to Shakespeare himself, & the image of “cannon” appears at the very opening of King John.18 It doesn’t do to say “Oh, well, the audience would never notice,” because many in the audience would notice, & feel that they had scored a point on Shakespeare by noticing. Besides, the assumption that Shakespeare was an impatient & slapdash writer is not a very fruitful one. It is a little truer to say, “Oh well, Shakespeare had more important things on his mind,” i.e. the imagery, though we shouldn’t assume that Shakespeare introduced the fine image of the thunderstorm because he “couldn’t resist” it. True, consistent imagery is more important than consistent historical fact. But we can’t ignore the element of deliberate departure from historical fact, a departure which stylizes the play, as departure from representational realism stylizes painting.

[17] I may be moving in the direction of a separable fifth theoretical paper, using stuff from the one I’ve begun. Then I could tackle the series of slop-over studies, TC, Lear, TAth, & Cy > P > CE. The reason I used the word paranoid is my audience’s conviction that there’s nothing new to be said on Shakespeare’s general conspectus as a poet, & that the only thing to do is duck inside one play at a time. I wonder if I could avoid this. I’ve thought for a long time of doing a paper on Lear: it isn’t a new notion. I can fan out from there into the conceptions of nature & nothingness, the storm as a reduction of creation to chaos, & so on.19

[18] That bit of horseplay I stole from Lister Sinclair20 is something I haven’t used since, though it’s true that the last time I did use it was in New York City. I mean the Titus Andronicus bit.

[19] {The World’s Best Garden: The Histories}
Nature & Nothingness: The Tragic & Ironic Plays
The Golden World: The Comedies
All of One Mind:21 The Romances

[20]                     III.

The Comedy of Errors is a trick done with mirrors: the twin theme means that, more or less, along with the tanist archetype.22 The Apuleian doppelganger fantasy is connected with imagery about drops of water falling into the sea, & the like, that have narcist overtones.23

[21] No: study the theme of the development of Shakespearean romance. Take romance as the telos or final cause of Shakespeare’s technique, & then pick out the elements in his earlier work that show that direction. This sounds gimmicky, but it doesn’t need to be. Take TC as a history play; follow it with the nature-nothing business in Lear, go on to Timon, then do the Comedy of Errors, which is earlier, but is an earlier version of Pericles:

I. Prelude & History (TC > Cy).

II. Nature & Nothing (L > WT).

III. Fool’s Gold (TAth >T).

IV. The Return from the Sea24 (CE > P).

Buggy, but the general idea will work.

[22] Shakespeare is close to the oral tradition; the search for a definitive written text is illusory and it’s easy to go out of proportion in thinking of verbal exactness as a basis for interpretation. TS, for example: it’s the overall structure that’s important, & that repeats.

[23] For IVI should read the sea group of comedies (CE, MV, TN, P & T) & link the imagery with Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, with the fishing business in Sakuntala & Rudens, with (of course) Apollonius in Gower, with Mucedorus & The Triumphs of Love & Fortune. Be thrifty: remember Bach.

[24] I starts off with my history point & TC as the fallen world, ending, as I say, with H8. All the histories come into it. Ill incorporates my Plutarch points and perhaps the Coriolanus stuff too. TAth is a play that shows the value of categorizing: so many take it as a failed tragedy, a King Lear that didn’t make it, whereas the kind of hero Timon is puts that comparison completely out of court.25 TAth is half folktale & half morality play. Incidentally, Shakespeare must have known that Apemantus means suffering no pain—I suppose he’s a student of Stoic apathy.26

[25] Some of that Harvard paper I never did use except in the Royal Society paper:27 I don’t think the Shakespeare surviving in opera business is in AC [Anatomy of Criticism]. Link with the Jonson point & my mythos-dianoia one: if you go after structure you may have rhythm, whereas if you go after rhythm you get the structure automatically.

[26]                     IV.

Patterns: King John’s hybris starts with his attempt to get rid of Arthur: the contrasting movement is when the Bastard defers to the child H3 [Henry III].28

[27]                     I.

IV (which may be moved back) should certainly turn on this Jonson business. One extreme is a static structure gradually revealed, a total disguise: that’s why SW [The Silent Woman] is Jonson’s best constructed play. The other extreme is the processional play. Pericles experiments with this, and Jonson was instinctively right in attacking it.29

[28]                     II.

Biblical archetypes are particularly important in seeing romance as Shakespeare’s telos, because they indicate the shape of his total myth. Jonah, Paul & Antiochus (Herod) turn up in Pericles. End of II, maybe.

[29]                     I.

The narrative basis of Pericles is a bit like Mozartian opera, the continuity being supplied by the equivalent of recitative:30 Gower’s prologues and the dumb shows. Curious the extremes of unity (Tempest, CE) and disunity (WT, Pericles). Derives from the history play, I suppose.

[30]                     IV.

Storm & tempest are the downward movement of the wheel of (fortune and) nature: the upward movement is {the rebirth of new life, in which art & Orpheus themes have a function. Statue becomes Hermione, “block” Thaisa, melancholy Pericles the restored king}.

[31] {Spatial mirror-trick of the twins in CE & TN becomes a temporal one with the risen Marina & Hermione-Perdita.}31

[32]                     IV.

In P.L. [Paradise Lost] the explicit imagery is Xn & Classical runs in cpt. [counterpoint] to it. In Comus this is reversed. So in Shakespeare: the Biblical articulation is subordinate to temples of Diana & such.

[33] The realism of the brothel scenes in Pericles was strong evidence to Victorian critics that Shakespeare did not write them and strong evidence to 20th c. critics that he did.32 The moral is that realism is a choice of conventions.

[34]                     II.

Something I haven’t yet got about the catharsis of comedy, as a structure independent of the moods of our responses. We may find TN serenely happy, or we may find it a dark comedy & Sir Toby a dismal shit & Malvolio a tragic hero. Our reactions are subsidiary to the structure, which makes such variety possible. There’s no definitive reaction, either to a single play or to Shakespeare as a whole. I’ll get this clearer after a bit.33

[35] Cymbeline with its denouement in 24 parts, is a Kunst der Fuge or academic play, a tour de force of recapitulation, like TN. It’s related to Othello somewhat as WT is related to Lear. Wonder if there is a Timon-Tempest affinity, as my scheme suggests: the romances are generally recapitulatory of Shakespeare, not just of the comedies: that’s my main point. In fact, though this kind of fearless symmetry is never much use, P has its centre of gravity, of recapitulation so to speak, in comedy, Cy in history, despite the Lucrece & Othello echoes, WT in tragedy, & T in irony (besides TAth, there’s the close MM link).

[36]                     II.?

In the history sequence the apocalyptic beginning & end are TC & Cy; the more strictly historical beginning & end are KJ & H8.1 think I could use my Hesperidean stuff here (prophecy at end of Friar Bungay & Peele’s Arraignment of Paris symb. [symbolism]) and I have my H8 notes. The prophecy of the birth of the (female) Elizabeth in H8 is an echo of the greater offstage birth in Cy.

[37]                     I.

Deliberate anachronism is one way of stylizing a play, to draw the spectator into a self-contained imgve. [imaginative] world, the retreat from realism in P marks an increase in “abstract” literary interest, as distortion does a pictorial interest. Another way is the use of deliberately unplausible folktale, especially in the problem comedies. Farce, less so. Also Stoll, in a perverse & bumbling way, got hold of a real point about Othello: the “big black fool” sermons from the audience are really protests against Shakespeare. Jonson uses different abstracting devices, mainly disguise, but his phrases about running away from & being afraid of Nature are accurate enough. We should get over the habit of speaking of such things as faults. If Cy has any merit, it has it because of its anachronisms, not in spite of them. They just might have occurred to Shakespeare, no matter how slapdash we may think he was.34 {The whole business of rescuing the realistic details is wrong—that’s why I say realism is a device of conventions}.35

[38]                     I.

The teleological play has unity of action, which means among other things that it keeps the action in a single plane, even if there are gods as well as men.36 The processional play is one of a group of types that expand the action into different dimensions. Two of these are important. {One is the reality > appearance dimension, of showing the play as a play & the play within a play is a species of this}. The manager’s prologue in Sakuntala; similar things in Pirandello. Mainly used for self-parody, as in Knight of the Burning Pestle. The Old Wives’ Tale is a beautiful example of this, & {presenting Pericles as a series of dramatized episodes from a Tale of Gower belongs to it. The big emblematic scenes in WT & T (masque) also belong}. The projected play, one might call it, EMOH [Every Man out of His Humour]: allegorical.

[39]                     I-II

The other is the play of vertical perspective, with scenes from heaven & hell. It’s common to connect tragic actions with hell, & {this is parodied in Jonson’s Devil Is an Ass}. The Prolog in Himmel [the Prologue in Heaven of Goethe’s Faust] goes back to the Book of Job. Peele’s Arraignment of Paris begins with Ate exploding from hell into a world of gods (mostly); The Rare Triumphs of Love & Fortune begins, Job-like, with Tisiphone coming from hell into the assembly of gods in heaven.37 This vertical perspective is preserved in the masque (and of course in operatic forms in a different way, where it raises the audience). The romances attempt to recapture some of this expanded perspective, what with the oracles & such.

[40] Further, all the stuff in the Harvard lecture of 1950 has not, so far as I remember, been used anywhere else, except in a paper buried in the RSG Transactions. Shakespeare & opera, the Whitman quotation, and soon.38

[41]                     II.

Further on the deliberately incredible: the explanations provided to the cast but not to the audience, and the curious, again almost deliberate, woodenness of the long expository scene in CE, which shows the disproportion between a romance story, which usually takes about twenty years to tell, and the dramatic presentation squeezed into a half day. It isn’t just inexperience, because exactly the same thing happens in T.39 Then in CE we note the rigidity of the irrational law set-up at the beginning, & the way it is deliberately ignored at the end. Similarly with the business of Shylock’s bond, the not a scruple more or less point [The Merchant of Venice, 4.2.326–32] is placed rightly for effect, wrongly for credibility. The defence of the unities of time & place assume that the audience can accept an illusion within limits. But in Shakespeare we are not being asked to accept an illusion: we are being asked to listen to the story. The manifesto of this simpler & more childlike appeal is set out once & for all in Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale, where Gammer Madge begins to tell her story to the young pages/Frolic & Fantastic. Q.40

[42] The Rare Triumphs of Love & Fortune (1582) has an opening scene in heaven, turning on a debat between Venus & Fortune. The former provides the happy ending & the latter the complications—pleasure & reality principles. In Shakespeare the symbol of Fortune is the tempest: the two are combined in Prospero. The magician is an agent of fortune, & the burning or destroying of his magic books signifies the end of the comic recognition. Symmetry in the wounding of brother & then of sister-heroine (latter a ritual death).

[43] I deals with the impetus of drama as against structure; II deals with the mythos as a displacement of myth. It looks from the present subtitle that my subconscious wants to deal with the four romances in order. “Mouldy Tales” is P; “Make Nature Afraid” seems to be settling into Cy; “The Triumph of Time,” though I was thinking of the historical TC-Cy sequence, is the subtitle of Pandosto, & “The Return from the Sea” certainly sounds like T.41 The other sequence is CE, TC, KL, TAth, which is chronologically right.

[44]                     II.

Curious the way Mediterranean & Atlantic worlds seem identified by superposition, like Albion & Jerusalem in Blake. The pastoral myth in England finally reached in Cy seems superimposed on Sicily. The scene of MA is laid in Sicily, where the Duke & his wife are Leonato & Innogen.42 The scene of T is between Carthage & Rome, yet the imagery is of Atlantic islands, mostly Bermuda. WT is Sicilian again, with those odd echoes of Lear.43

[45]                     I.

If you listen to a tale, instead of accepting an illusion, you trust the tale rather than the writer, as Lawrence said.44 {The sense of emancipation into a timeless world is the opposite of the teleological play, which is why a good romance always lasts at least fifteen years}. The expository scenes in CE & T set the atmosphere of a recounted tale, with charmed listeners: Gower’s function in P.

[46]                     II.

Jonson explicitly says that, like a realistic painter, he wants to be judged by his skill in rendering a subject-matter: Shakespeare depends for his persuasiveness not on logic, but exclusively on rhetoric. In the foreground are the speakers that fill up the emotional reactions to the mythical episodes; in the background is {the relentless “and then … and then” beat of the story}. If the rhetorical expression of the episodes is hasty or perfunctory (it is in RTLF [The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune]), the play seems crude: {the dramatist’s sense of timing must be infallible}.

[47] I’m still not sure why the romances are so rigidly conservative about society: why a poor girl can’t marry a prince without turning out to be a real princess. I suppose {the stability of society works against the wheel of fortune that keeps turning in 48}.45 It’s an auto appeal to subject oneself to the story, the opposite of hissing the villain in a melodrama. It’s so insistent and yet so damn silly, yet I found something similar as far away as Lady Murasaki. Aristocracy is a wish-fulfilment principle rather than a reality-principle. Anyway, {this is where the Whitman quotation goes}.46

[48] not used47 I.

The trial scene in MV stretches Shylock’s inflexibility to the absolute limit before Portia produces her drop of blood quibble, and then he drops the business about not one scruple more or less.48 The order may be wrong logically, but it’s right rhetorically, & that’s what matters.

[49]                     TragedyIII-IV

The deliberate anti-realism in Shakespeare is to take us into a self-contained dramatic imgve. [imaginative] world which eventually turns out to be a romance world. The temptation of Othello & Posthumus, morally & realistically, throws the onus on them: why the hell did they get jealous? Dramatically, it’s thrown on the villainy of Iago & Iachimo. This is clearer in Cy, where P [Posthumus] is practically exonerated from any wrongdoing at all. Cf. the Count in Figaro.

[50] Curious how thoroughgoing Shakespeare is in MM & {Cy} to touch every character with prospective death. {Like suspecting everybody in a detective story}.

[51]                     I.

So often we get the Elizabethan audience thrown at us as a kind of censor principle: what they would think. Hell, they weren’t allowed to think: not in Shakespeare. They could like or dislike the play, & that was it.49 When Jonson introduces Adam Overdo, the disguised magistrate, in BF [Bartholomew Fair], we are allowed to think that eavesdropping is not too sporting an event: we are not allowed to think this in MM. If we started to think about MM, we’d think that all the characters, with the possible exception of Lucio, were insane.50 This is a “problem” play, of the kind you think about from the start, but God what a mess it is when you start thinking about it that way. Take Ibsen’s Wild Duck as an example of a real problem play: three stages.

[52]                     IV.

All’s well that ends well is a rule of comedy: cf. the Book of Job, when Job gets three brand-new daughters at the end.51

[53]                     I.

Jonson takes the revenge of Puff in Sheridan’s Critic: “I’ll print it, every word.”52 Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have given a damn whether he ever got printed or not.

[54] What the hell is II about? About mythos & myth, of course, & either including, or leading up to, the imgve. [imaginative] vertical universe. The showing of death as a dramatic basanos53 is a moral dialectic separating the up from the down world.

[55] I said of Wyatt that not many poets got the resonance he could into the C of L [Court of Love] conventions. Shakespeare is a dramatist who gets the maximum of resonance out of them.

[56]                     II.

AW: Helena dies & revives, & is also {the presenter, accomplishing her two impossible tasks} of healing the old king & redeeming the young hero. The extraordinary melancholy of the play, from the opening scene all in black to the muted conclusion (Lafeu is disappointed) & that disconcerting speech of the “unhappy” & deeply religious clown, makes the title deliberately provocative. Shades of an underworld with a paternal or maternal figure surrounding Bertram.

[57]                     I-II.

There is no use assuming that in trying to interpret a play properly we are approximating Shakespeare’s view of it. So far as we know, he viewed his plays entirely in terms of their dramatic effectiveness.

[58]                     II.

{Shylock is a folklore Jew because he’s in a comedy; Othello is a black human being because he’s in a tragedy}.54 The empathy with the audience is closest in comedy.

[59]                     I.

Conventionalized literature is popular.

[60]                     IV.

II is the development through comedy to romance. The sea group; the forest group; the humor group. Note the persistent amnesia of comedy: my book of Job point.55 Unreality of what’s lived through; like dream, yet what’s lived through is what’s called reality. If I add TAth to the romances I should get IV clearer.

[61]                     III.

In both TN & AW we have an old clown hung over from an earlier generation, a somewhat bitter & melancholy clown. In both we have a melancholy & all-black opening scene, with Orsino & Olivia corresponding to the King of France & the Countess. Note how often the clown is a raping stallion: Feste, Lavache, Costard, Lancelot.

[62]                     IV.

I said in my essay on T that we start with a conception of reality as given & end with a conception of reality as created. The creating agent is “art,” which acts as illusion, in both T & WT. In P it’s music and healing (Cerimon). In AW at least the dispelling of illusion is the work of the disguised heroine. In AW Bertram thinks it’s heaven to screw Diana & hell to screw Helena, but in the dark he doesn’t know the difference.56

[63]                     III.

In EI [The Educated Imagination] I suggested that the white-goddess cycle was inside the Biblical one. In Shakespeare a black bride cycle fits inside the historical one. The white goddess one is dimly present in the tragedies, but the black bride or long-legged bait is what’s important.57 The long-legged bait is clearest in Marina of Pericles, where it’s linked with the magical invulnerability of chastity. Descent of Ishtar, not that that does me any good.

[64]                     III.

Parental figures are in the oracle scene in Cy as well as AW.

[65]                     IV.

The action of a manipulated or conventionalized comedy is often called providential: Ariosto’s Suppositi says God must have willed the conclusion, & a vicious parody of the same sentiment occurs in Machiavelli’s Mandragola, which I should quote.58 Hence the role of Diana, Jupiter & Apollo in Shakespeare, & the Christian-sounding transcendence of law in MM & MV & LLL.

[66]                     III.

Love disintegrates the comic society when it doesn’t crystallize it. This is the dramatic function of rivalry & jealousy.

[67]                     III.

TN begins, like AW, “all in black,” with Orsino melancholy & Olivia in mourning. Their cure, Sebastian to one & Viola to the other, is fished out of the sea. TN also calls attention to its improbability: the principle, of course, is that conventionalized plot is what’s relaxing.

[68]                     check for III.

I suppose Lyly’s Endymion is a pretty central type: hero an Adonis figure who prefers friendship to love (TGV, MA, the sonnets), & gets both. He is redeemed by the condescension of Cynthia, who turns out to be not a white goddess but an Isis figure. In Peele’s Arraignment of Paris Helen is an anti-Diana, declaring war on Diana in hell, forest & moon. The Hecate part of Diana is turned over to the C of L [Court of Love].

[69]	Points of emotional repose:	The Song
	The Soliloquy	The Chorus Comment
	The Dumb Show
	The Emblematic Scene
	The Point of Ritual Death
	The Recognition
	The Final Dance, Wedding or Feast

[70]                     II-III.

II should begin with structure as the focus of eye vs. kinetic emotion (Dryden)59 as the focus of a mob. TS: ironic double moment of K [Katharina] & B [Bianca]. In Sh’s [Shakespeare’s] play Sly goes to sleep after the 1st scene, which is right. In the Q [Quarto] he reappears at the end, having had the play as a wet dream, ready to apply its principles to his own married life.60

[71]                     I.

In writing on T.S. Eliot61 I came to realize that his theory of poetic drama really applied best of all to The Waste Land, & that his actual plays moved steadily away from it. His movement is the opposite of Shakespeare, who goes from action-controlled plays to the operatic Pericles, where Gower tells the story in recitativo & a series of scenes literally supported by melos & opsis (dumb show) which epiphanizes the story.

[72] Well, I ought to be fairly clear by now, II seems to be essentially an analysis of the structure of comedy, as I have it now, going through the features that point to romance. Ill brings up the world-picture & the history sequence from TC to Cy. The apocalyptic imagery in A&C & why it’s there: the whole static picture of time, nature, fortune, and art. IV would then try to set this in motion by discussing the essential point of history (liberalizing continuity), comedy (regeneration of nature by art), & of tragedy (vision of original destiny of hero). Perhaps it’s in IV rather than II that I deal with my Co–T Ath–P sequence, the scaling down of human perspective, & the like, but my H8 points surely belong in III.

[73] In Sakuntala62 a king loves a displaced tree-maiden (she has a bark dress & is beloved by the wood nymphs), the child of a sage & a nymph sent to tempt him. She unintentionally offends another sage63 who curses her, causes the king to forget that he married her secretly—she’s pregnant. The cursing sage later modifies his curse to saying it’ll end when the king sees “the ring of recognition” he’s given S. S. loses the ring: it falls into the Ganges & is swallowed by a carp which is caught by a fisherman who is arrested for stealing the ring. The king then remembers, but S. in the meantime has been caught up to heaven, or at least a Lower Paradise. The king is led there by Indra’s charioteer, where he meets his child (prophecy of the child’s greatness as the later King Bharata is the main point) &, eventually, S. The general shape of the action is closest to AW.

[74]                     II.

When the dromenon64 is cut off the magic turns inward & helps build up the imgve. [imaginative] universe. The theme of the abandoning of magic is linked to the completing of the comic action.

[75]                     III-IV.

II is a study of comedy as, in origin, a magical inducing of a birth; thence, as literature, a drive toward identity. This identity has social (new society), individual (released humor), natural (solstitial pointing & green world), divine (providence) aspects, all interrelated & harmonized by “art.”

[76]                     II, etc.

III is a study of Shakespearean imagery founded on the assumption that the “Elizabethan world-picture” is not just a matter of humors & planetary spheres. It starts with the expansion of history into the TC-Cy sequence, then fits that into the Biblical sequence by way of the apocalyptic symbolism in AC [Antony and Cleopatra]. It develops the musictempest imagery out of II & the contrast of love & fortune. Also the grotesqueries in the comedies (Falstaff as whale; cook in CE as Great Whore) take their humor from their resonance within the dramatic universe.65

[77] IV is probably a study of the sequence of Shakespeare’s later plays up to the romances. How far back I’ll go I don’t know, but I should think the L-M-AC-Co-TAth sequence, along with some discussion of AW & MM, should be there anyway.

[78]                     III.

The comedies begin in the shadow of death or melancholy, followed by a period of confusion symbolized by either wandering or by disguise, or both. Disguise, almost always a girl dressing as a boy, is a development of a ritual of interchanging garments in a period of saturnalia. My Deut. [Deuteronomy] point. The theme of lust in MM & P is part of the license theme.

[79]                     II.

Note that my two themes, the cutting off of the externally related dromenon66 and the structure as the focus of a community, are closely related to Dryden’s notions of the power of music as magical in a preartistic way.67

[80]                     Tragedy III (II)

One of the main points of IV is the study of the pharmakos figure: my Coriolanus point developing through Alcibiades in Timon (return for vengeance reconciled) & Belarius in Cy. Antony in AC is one because he’s a triple pillar of the world, Lepidus is called this in mockery: Antony really is a soldier’s (may)pole reaching to the moon, an Atlas or Babel figure: Octavius wins because he is never (check) so regarded or referred to: he can survive a tragedy because he adjusts to a fallen world, like Ulysses in TC.

[81]                     II.

The people who engage in magical rituals are agents: they’d probably resent the suggestion that they are actors in a play, which is how they look to a “critic,” such as an anthropologist. As soon as they turn inward, myth takes charge of dromenon.68 But {myth then needs to be displaced in the direction of a historical event, or, later, a romantic story, for the myth can’t just be: this is a contest of summer & winter”; the absurdity of that deprived of magic is too manifest}.69

[82]                     III.

I don’t know if I could arrive at a theory of the typical structure of comedy in II: I can generalize three stages: an opening scene which sets up either an absurd law (social: CE, MND, MM) or a melancholy mood (individual: TN, MV, AW); second, a period of wandering & disguise where values are upset; third, the comic stretto.70 This corresponds to Gaster’s periods of fasting, purgation & festival.71 {Note the similarity of the Isis bride of the Song of Songs seeking the groom & the disguised heroine seeking her man.} Now if I could divide the stretto into typical agon-pathos-anagnorisis phases I’d be all set, but that’s too easy. There’s a strong agon theme in MV, in the typical form of the lawsuit. Pharmakos figures include Falstaff in MW (from the very opening line), Parolles, whose unmasking is a relief because it leads him to a sense of identity, & Malvolio. But I doubt if anything as clear-cut as Aristophanes’ form would emerge.

[83]                     IV.

In Sakuntala the denouement occurs when the king is told that his forgetfulness of the heroine wasn’t his fault. Bunyan in the Valley of the Shadow—I mean Christian—is distressed by the evil voices he hears, because he thought they came [sic] from his own mind. This is connected with the dramatic tendency to make a pharmakos of the tempter and absolve the temptee. You can’t do it with Bertram, but it’s done with Claudio: one’s the other inside out.

[84]                     IV.

Wonder why drama & romance always aim straight for marriage, which means a black bride cycle, and why lyric poetry is so largely confined to the white goddess.

[85]                     III.

Anyway, Gaster’s kenosis-plerosis scheme72 is clear in WT & perhaps in P, not impossibly in MM, which seems to have the same binary form as WT.

[86] {Oaths, compacts & laws relate to the social side of comedy; witnesses are chorus characters and pharmakoi like Jaques in AY; the ordeal is individual} (except in that extraordinary Lope de Vega play).73

[87] Gaster quotes Bourne as saying that Midsummer fires were kindled in order that “the lustful Dragons might be driven away,” his note referring to Brand’s P.A., 304. MW?74

[88] I might use my PT point as an example of what I mean by identification.75

[89]                     IV.

The conflict with the dragon of the sea is reflected in the sea comedies, especially T. The shipwrecked group is the sea, human life unredeemed. The sea encounter, music against tempest, is dialectic (P & T); the green world group are more cyclical.

[90]                     IV.

I’ve said this in a different way, but {emancipation from law in comedy has to do with internalizing behavior: the hero really disappears into the audience who identify with him}. So does the tragic hero, but he draws the audience together: the comic hero individualizes it. In this process everything “out there,” everything fixed or definable or compulsory, becomes a subordinate reality. The individualized audience is partly the reason for the contrasting assembly at the end of a comedy.

[91]                     III.

I suppose Herne is an Anglicized Orion, a lubberly hunter.76 The MW seems, with its red, white & green in Q [the Quarto], is [sic] the one obvious example of Shakespeare’s use of folklore ritual drama.

[92]                     III.

The N.C. [New Comedy] scheme of the triumph of youth over the senex iratus is all right as far as it goes, but I shouldn’t overlook the fact that one of the central elements in the comic resolution is continuity. The pharmakos has to be very carefully handled: either he’s voluntary, like Jaques, or reconciled, like Malvolio. Emphasis on driving him out tends to make the society a mob.77 Anyway (I’ve said all this) the senex is never a pharmakos: he’s always reconciled, because {only continuity can liberate. That’s one reason why the romances are so insanely conservative.}

[93]                     III.

In Shakespeare lust, a generalized desire for a female, is a sterility principle, opposed to love. This is clear in Pericles, and in MW, where the lustful {Falstaff is identified with Herne the hunter, a sterility principle}. Similarly Bertram & Angelo think it’s heaven to go to bed with Diana or Isabella & hell to go to bed with Helena or Mariana, but in the dark they can’t tell the difference.78 ([Terence’s] Hecyra theme of previous salvation: Ion of course).

[94]                     III.

In TGV we have the purest C of L [Court of Love] in Shakespeare: {Silvia is called lady} & calls her lovers servants. Hence this theme runs through its logical course to renunciation in favor of friendship, which is right for the convention but wrong for drama, which is entirely black-bride. The C of L is another sterility principle that has to be cast out.

[95]                     III.

The theme of the expulsion of lust in MM: {Angelo’s private virtue is relevant magically: you can’t set vice to catch vice in a fairytale. Lucio’s punishment in making him marry a whore is in direct cpt. [counterpoint] to Angelo’s being forced to marry Mariana.}

[96]                     Tragedy? II?

My Shakespeare and Milton studies are drawing closer together:79 the disappearance of a central character transforms the action from external spectacle into the internal identity of the final society. The king disappears in H41 (many marching in his coats), in H5 (Harry le Roy) and of course in MM (the duke as principle of government).

[97] Well, I & II are now pretty clear, & III is manifesting an outline or two. IV is still a fairly complete haze, unless it’s the present III.

[98]                     IV.

Quote the passage from the preface to the Q [Quarto] of TC about the comedies having sprung from the sea of Venus.80 In T the masque of gods has a deliberate auto form—the recession of the flood.

[99]                     III.

Re the pharmakos principle: what is expelled is either a person or a state of mind. The nearer melodrama & kinetic mob feeling a comedy is, the more the pharmakos is a person: in a civilized comedy it’s a state like lust, & the individual is reclaimed, or married off beyond his merits, like Claudio or Proteus. (Grace vs. merit). The voluntary pharmakos Jaques is an interesting experiment: half comic butt & half chorus. His religious leanings link him with Lavache in AW, & Lavache has links both with Feste & with Armado—this last again is part butt & part chorus. Melancholy, real or affected, is the anti-comic humor.

[100]                     III.

Identity in marriage (PT) is expressed by the very accurate phrasing of the Hymen song in AY: “atone together.”81 {This song also expands the perspective in assimilating the forest of Arden to “heaven”—the Sakuntala recognition scene}.

[101] The sequence II-IV is the same as the Milton I-III82—structure, imagery, characterization. If I got the world-picture expanded into III, I think IV should open out all right.

[102]                     II.

(Rewritten earlier point). Love depends on grace, not on merit. It is curious how many men are married to great applause [to someone] whom one would think no great catch: Bertram, Angelo, Claudio, Demetrius, Proteus, even Sir Toby. Several things here: the drive to a festive conclusion (all’s well); the sense of previous events as forgotten, etc. After all, in reading detective stories we often feel that most people who get murdered deserve it, & sympathize with the murderer.

[103]                     II.

In [Terence’s] Hecyra all the characters including the courtesan Bacchis are decent & kindly people except the hero Pamphilus. He’s a jerk: the most troublesome juvenile delinquent in New York would have a more intelligible code of morals than that83. Similarly with Claudio, who makes no resistance whatever to the suggestion that Hero is unfaithful: merely says that if she is of course he’ll repudiate her. Afterwards he shows not the slightest sign of remorse or even awareness of other views, until he’s proved wrong. Beatrice has the sympathy of the audience when she regards him as a worm, but the amnesia of the action carries him along.84 I think the point of MA is, besides its title, the double action: Claudio doesn’t need to be released from a humor because Benedick is.

[104]                     IV.

The amnesia drive means that, as in Sakuntala, the resolution is in a different world. TS is, in the Q [Quarto], projected as a dream of Sly.

[105] The main theme of II-IV, and perhaps the specific theme of IV, is the principle that the greater the writer the more central the principles he recaptures. Hence Shakespeare starts out with N.C. [New Comedy] & Seneca & a few Italian & early English models, & promptly feels his way back through Menander & Euripides to the original ritual pattern. I suppose my Sakuntala summary would then go into IV.

[106] Literature exists in the unborn world85 between is and is not. In tragedy we are oppressed by the feeling of reality or is, & have to remind ourselves (e.g. in the blinding of Gloucester) that we can be entertained & feel exuberant because it’s not happening. In comedy we are oppressed by the feeling of unreality or is not, & this survives in the sense of amnesia. We say to the Gloucester scene: “This, thank God, isn’t happening, but it’s the kind of thing that could happen.” To the fifth act of AY we say: “This is the kind of thing that couldn’t happen, but it’s happening.” We remind ourselves of the reality of our desire to see things turn out “right,” and of the strength of the impetus toward such a conclusion: that’s the reality of comedy.

[107]                     II.

Re the cutting off of the dromenon:86 drama is born in the renunciation of magic, & at the end of T it remembers its inheritance. Its external relations, like Prospero’s after his exile, are with a purely human world, & so become psychological, a quest for identity.

[108]                     Tragedy? III-IV

In our cultural framework the yearly cycle (& daily) is projected as fall & apocalypse, & I think I can find enough in Shakespeare to show that those Biblical archetypes, usually in their Ovidian form, appear in him. But the real fall is the awakening of a self-conscious individual in an alien world, & the real apocalypse his further awakening in a society that corresponds to & complements his individuality, & Shakespeare’s structures might be interpreted as ways of expressing the Biblical structure without being tied down to explicit Biblical symbols. If I could show that, III at least would be clear.

[109]                     IV.

When drama renounces magic it enters a purely human world. Its external relations are with ordinary human life; when it turns its back on life and forms a self-contained literary universe it seeks enclosed reality, nature which is art, cf. Polixenes.

[110]                     Tragedy? not used: some III & some IV

Re that Timon-T link that’s been bugging me: I want IV to deal partly with the theme of the isolated figure, to which the rhetoricless Coriolanus & Timon are linked. Timon is a sacrificial man eaten & drunk in the first half & tries to identify himself with the tempest arch, [archetype] in the 2nd half. The tempest in Shakespeare (Lear, WT, etc.) is the destruction of the order of nature, not just bad weather. Now Prospero is an isolated pharmakos in the first half of the action (i.e. before the play begins), & begins his communal-man role with a tempest.

[111]                     IV.

Cf. Proteus’s remark in TGV about Orpheus’s compelling Leviathan to dance on sands with H5’s remark at Harfleur that the kind of king he is can’t.87

[112]                     III.

The fool in the comedies is often the character who remains individualized, outside the new identity.88 In TN he’s lustful & a hangover from a previous generation—both recurring themes. He makes his speech about the whirligig of time [5.1.376–7] when Olivia uses the word “fool” to Malvolio the churl, yet he’s still isolated as his plaintive song at the end shows. Jaques is the educated fool or satirist, who feels an immediate sense of identity with Touchstone & shows a curious jealousy of his marriage. He’s a wanderer, a perpetual spectator. Lavache in AW is again lustful & of the previous generation, & he makes that terrifying speech.89 Falstaff in MW & his fairies speech [5.5.122–8]. Armado in LL, which reverses all the imagery of comedy, brings off all the honours. In the romances the fool tends to become the natural man: Cloten is different in Cy; Autolycus in WT has much of the role but is a thief; Trinculo, note, is the object of Caliban’s jealousy, & is a jester. Cf. the “motley to the view” sonnet [Sonnet 110]. There is a curious conversation between Lavache & Parolles which also establishes a link: Parolles achieves his identity by being known for a fool.

[113]                     III.

This business of the fool’s double90 is interesting: examples are: Armado-Costard (LL); Touchstone-Jaques (AY); Caliban-Trinculo (T); Lavache-Parolles (AW); perhaps Lucio-Pompey (MM); certainly Feste-Malvolio (TN). It may be part of the general doubling theme. Gobbo-Shylock (MV); undeveloped but anticipates the escape-from-Shylock theme. Jaques is inspired by Touchstone to become a satirist, a role he attempts with Orlando without much success. He’s a Childe Harold but not a Byron.

[114]                     III.

The real fall of man is not a historical event but the awakening of self-consciousness in the individual, the kind of awareness that alienates. The alien consciousness eats into the belief in sympathetic magic & so helps to create drama; but it’s essentially the attitude of the spectator. Hence a dialectic is created between the attitude of the spectator as such and the aspect of him that participates in the comic apocalypse, the society created around and as one man.

[115]                     III.

MW relates to the forest comedies partly because, as in AY & TG, there’s a sense of an original Golden Age Robin Hood group, to which Prince Henry & Fenton belonged. MW describes first the degenerate Falstaff society, then the isolation of Falstaff when he discharges his followers, then a hint of a rebirth when Fenton does what Falstaff can’t do, invade the middle-class Windsor society. The Falstaff groups are brigands or drones until they disperse, & then Falstaff goes into his carrying-out-Death role.

[116] Coriolanus is an ironic Alcibiades—it’s in the TC conception. A crude, heroic warrior aristocracy looked at in terms of its actual relation to a debased mob—debased because the aristocracy is there.

[117]                     III.

The internalization of parental figures: the Cy oracle, AW, T. {The failure to internalize is the tragedy of Co.} It’s a central part of the identity problem. An identified person is identified with his wife and as his reborn ancestry. The opposite is fortune, separating the lovers, and law, the sense of parental authority externally imposed.

[118]                     IV.

In the histories, which are closely related to the tragedies, continuity is established by force: Octavius, Fortinbras, Macduff—but there’s no internalizing of it as there is in comedy, hence the rejection of H5’s comic father Falstaff. No internalizing of the natural or Belarius society.

[119]                     III.

The period of sexual license is usually, as I say, represented by the heroine’s disguise as a boy.91 The “problem” comedies use the substituted bride, & MND has a similar device. TG has the disguise plus Proteus’ fickleness: confusion of identity in CE & TN is nearer the centre. The 6 times are TG, MV, AY, MW, TN and Cy.

[120]                     IV.

In the Renaissance a good deal of the conception “natural” was simply what one was used to. Thus Sidney is horrified by the barbarous practice of putting rings in the nose instead of “in the fit & natural places of the ears.”92

[121]                     III. & IV.

The disguise93 of the heroine can be a death as well—loathly lady94 arch, [archetype]. “One Hero died defiled, but I do live,” says Hero in MA [5.4.63]. I still don’t know what MA is about, but there’s a great deal of insistence on Hero’s death. Borachio’s drunken talk about the giddiness of fashion is repeated in an odd way by Benedick.

[122]                     IV.

The newness of the new society may be the old renewed, but it is never a return to the old. The return to the old is the nostalgic, which is not the comic. The instinct to retreat to a child’s protected society is the root of the conception of the sentimental, which is something Shakespearean comedies at their worst never are.95 The amnesia point is connected with this.

[123]                     III. or IV.

At present I think of IV as essentially a study of the four romances, using Co & TAth as a prelude & H8 as a postlude. That would make it difficult to summarize. I need more stuff on the continuity of history, the legitimacy principle as the real comic death-&-renewal pattern in history which is continually interrupted by usurpation & tyranny (fortune). Shakespeare has no opinions—only structural patterns. My RJ note will be useful, also some of my H6 marginalia. My thoughts seem to be running on the relation of comedy & history, with relatively little on tragedy. The historical ideal is the weeded garden of R2: the Lancastrians split this into the two father-figures H4 & Falstaff, so that H5 has to choose one & not the other. The Roman world is similarly split between Octavius—or Octavia—and Cleopatra.

[124]                     IV.

Other splits: Hector-Ulysses; Timon-Alcibiades; Prospero-Antonio. Perhaps that’s the role of Belarius too. Cymbeline: Wales seems to have a secret-garden role in that play: perhaps an Arthur-Tudor allegory.

[125]                     Tragedy II.

Critics of Shakespeare may amuse themselves by discussing whether or not Romeo was damned: there is no evidence that Shakespeare did.96

[126]                     IV.

The theme of madness in the comedies: “This is very midsummer madness,” Olivia says of Malvolio [Twelfth Night, 3.4.56], and the same common phrase may be responsible for the title of MND, the action of which appears to take place on the first of May.

[127] The obvious accentuating of a story by a conventional pattern such as the whodunit of a detective story is what makes highly conventional literature so readable. It also makes the quality of description & characterization in the writing a rhetorical tour de force, something achieved in spite of the convention.97 {Shakespeare is attracted to history at first because the events of the chronicles indicate the framework that he has to fill up with the appropriate rhetoric}.

[128]                     not used: Tragedy II.98

H61: Talbot is the tragic hero, of course, the survival of the H5 spirit, conquerable only, like Coriolanus, by treachery. He compares himself & his son to Daedalus & Icarus, who escape by death from what Suffolk later calls a labyrinth full of Minotaurs.99 The end of the play mentions Paris & Helen, the theme being the transfer of the demonic female will from a foreign enemy (Joan) to England itself (Margaret): evil is internalized at the moment it’s caught. Same sort of design as the coronation of H6 in Act IV accompanied by the chasing out of the pharmakos Fastolfe. The poignant scene of the death of Mortimer indicates the dimension of the ancestral curse on the House of Lancaster, without compelling us to accept it. Joan is so complex a character that critics assign her to two authors, the one they approve of being Shakespeare. She speaks well & nobly of her mission, of France’s case (her rhetoric is supposed to hypnotize Burgundy at once), and seems genuinely possessed by a belief in her own purity & nobility of descent. At the same time she has a brusque realism (v. [viz] the titles of Talbot); she speaks well for France just as Shylock speaks well for Jews. Yet she’s terrified of death. To have unified these elements into a rhetorically convincing unit would have been a formidable task for Shakespeare at the height of his powers, & of course would have completely shattered a mere chronicle play. As with Shylock or Cleopatra, she’s isolated from the action, yet one feels that a separate dramatic world, where France has its de jure kingship, is locked up inside her. She may have turned to fiends in a genuine patriotism, & so be less ruthless than Lady Macbeth. We can’t say, because she’s not natural; but it’s all potentially there. The hypothesis is purely dramatic: let England’s enemy be evil and treacherous (using unfair weapons). No actress could bring unity out of Joan’s character, for the interconnecting links have not been written.

[129]                     IV.

I’m still not clear about the independence of dramatic structure from how we feel about the characters, but it seems to be shaping up as the central principle of IV. The Hecyra point.100 The question “Is Falstaff a coward?” is a good example of a pseudo-problem in criticism. Falstaff appears in plays that are dominated by acceptance of a heroic code, & he doesn’t accept it, playing the role in history of a churl in comedy. Whether or not this makes him a coward depends on our moral attitude to that code. Fastolfe, in H61, is presented as a simple coward within the assumptions of the heroic convention of the play, where Talbot is a tragic hero. Falstaff is not simple, because he’s able to articulate other standards such as realistic common sense.

[130]                     not used: perhaps Tragedy? III?

We deal with such confusers of assumptions as though they were real people ([Samuel] Johnson & [Elmer Edgar] Stoll no less than [Frances] Ferguson & [A.C.] Bradley) because they set up a direct rapprochement with the audience. In the H6-R3 tetralogy it isn’t until R3 emerges from the final play that we feel real dramatic integrity of character standing out from the tapestry. The reason is that he’s an actor, and a hypocrite or masked character, and he suggests a kind of real life, however reprehensible, which he & the audience at least know about.

[131]                     II.

It’s unnecessary to assume that Shakespeare accepted his conventions, and very dangerous to assume that he accepted ours and treated his own audience ironically. We have tough & tender-minded critics taking one side or other of these views, equally irrelevant.

[132] I’m beginning to suspect that III & IV have to interchange, & that what I end with is the typological panorama & the general view of imagery. This would include Shakespeare’s total view of history, which incorporates the more dialectical view of tragedy & comedy. H6-R3 is a cycle ending in the dialectical precipitates of H7 [Henry VII] & R3 [Richard III].

[133] cf. Tragedy not used:101 III could use Joan & other history e.g.’s. Isolation from the action: in all the dreary Wars of the Roses we feel dramatic sympathy primarily with the losers, because they’re isolated from the action. It looks as though III were primarily a study of this feature of isolation, taking off from the fool-pharmakos situation in the comedies. In the histories, the fool role becomes tragic & heroic, the role of John of Gaunt in R2, of Talbot in H61, of Humphrey in H62, of H6 himself in H63, of (perhaps) Clarence in R3, and of Falstaff in H5.

[134]                     Tragedy I-II.

R2 is isolated in the opposite way from R3. The latter is pure de facto & hypocrite; R2 is pure de jure, & is an actor who throws himself into every role suggested to him, notably that of the betrayed Christ. Shakespeare plays down his twenty years of incompetence & concentrates everything on the pathos of deposition. Why? Was he superstitious about the magic of de jure royalty? I doubt it. He’s the already fallen & doomed son of Adam (Abel).

[135]                     III.

I don’t seem to have said that a) TAth is a comedy turned inside out, disappearing into the mind of a pharmakos character, much as T turns MM inside out b) the quarrel of Timon & Apemantus102 (a fool) is the stretto of the comic fool-pharmakos tension. Qy [Query]: does Thersites represent the amalgamating of fool & pharmakos in the same person?

[136]                     III.

Independence of dramatic structure has something to do with the integrity of the contrasting world inside the pharmakos’ mind. TN from Malvolio’s point of view is a pretty grim play.103 Leave this out, & we have melodrama; make too much of it, & we have sentimentalized rcsm. [romanticism]. We can never get the perfect performance, of course:104 every performance has to select what it will do.

[137]                     IV.

The sentimental nostalgia, directed at the individual childhood: the song of innocence, the vision of Beulah, the recognition of Shakespearean romance comes very close to the sentimental but avoids it because it’s directed toward the generic or Adamic childhood.105 In romance there’s a stronger sense of re-establishing something forgotten than in the festive comedies, which stress rather resolution than recognition.

[138] II if anywhere not used & probably not usable now.

The point I now have at the end of I should be developed in IV: pick up again the Portrait discussion of lyric-epic-drama progression,106 and show that it’s a distinction among personal-centered, like-centered & individual-centered (in Jung’s sense) artists, not a generic distinction. Joyce is fascinated by it because the problem of casting adrift from the ego-centered consciousness is the crux of his art. Shakespeare seems never to have had an ego-center: in any case we can’t point to it or locate it. I want IV to try to outline what his omniscient and epiphanic vision is, through his imagery-structure.

[139]                     mostly IV, I think

The other world exists in Shakespeare, as in Dante, mainly to confirm the social set-up in this one. Jack Cade, according to Iden, goes to hell; Edward IV goes to heaven. Hubert is “damned” if he kills the rightful heir Arthur, yet H4 seems to get away with dodging the responsibility for killing R2. This principle of presenting a wish-fulfilment world as aristocratic is in the romances. It’s a bugger to try to understand a writer who has no personal attitude. The king de jure has a magical aura around him: the logic of such a superstition is that a king de facto who has any claim to the throne at all should exterminate everybody with a better one, & will thereby acquire that aura. R3 thinks he’s done it; this is why I call the principle of legitimacy comic: {the hidden eiron gimmick we’ve forgotten about}.107

[140]                     III & IV. Tragedy I

{The principle of legitimacy comes into the Christian myth too: the gospels begin by demonstrating Jesus’ descent from David. Macbeth is Herod: he slaughters all the innocents within reach.}108 The Herod background to A&C is important too. The Roman plays have no principle of legitimacy: that’s one reason why our sympathies are so divided. They repeat the TC fall world. The legitimacy principle, as H8 indicates, indicates109 the providential at work in history.

[141]                     II.

Macbeth is the most concentrated study of tyranny as a force within the individual soul which has to be cast out of that as well as out of society. The tyrant exists because his victims are tyrants to themselves. Hence the otherwise tedious & embarrassing business of Malcolm’s confession to Macduff. Nota bene, for I, that Macbeth is not a play about the moral crime of murder: it is a play about the dramatically conventional crime of killing the lawful king.

[142]                     II.

Jonson has an armed prologue in the Poetaster to make a comment on society; Shakespeare has one in TC for decorum, as a symbol belonging to the theme.110

[143]                     IV.

In the Roman plays there’s no principle of legitimacy, but {in AC & Cy there’s an offstage Christ child as a hidden eiron gimmick}. Analogues of it elsewhere too: {Macbeth is a Herod or Pharaoh, & Antiochus is in P}. The tribute to Rome in Cy has also the legitimist comic overtone of the third Troy subjecting itself to the second one.

[144]                     IV (mostly) Tragedy I

The Roman perspective is ironic: our sympathies divide, & the relevant example is the destruction of Troy in TC. The other principle is romantic, where there is a correlation in “virtue” or “nobility” or “gentleness” between moral & social rank (“I am the best of them that speak this speech” [The Tempest, 1.2.430]).

[145]                     written but so far excreted.

IV may begin with the Joyce argument [see par. 138]. Lyric poets have a centre in themselves, which may be extracted by looking at the characteristic images. Epic poets articulate the centre. Dramatic poets have an epiphanic or movable centre, revealed in every play they write.

[146]                     III.

At the end of a comedy part of us is engaged in the wedding festivity, but part of us is outside, hypnotized by a lank figure with a wild tale about a becalmed & God-forsaken ship.111

[147]                     III.

{In Courtly Love poetry the act of falling in love & under the rule of the God of Love is analogous to accepting the social contract} in philosophy. In comedy the contract appears at the end. No it doesn’t.

[148] Continuity as a liberalizing principle (Burke)112 is the point of the histories. The fact that art aids in restoring this is the point of the comedies. Epiphany in law of an original heroic vision is the point of the tragedies.

[149] {The fact that disguise is conventionally impenetrable to other characters, though never to us, reinforces the amnesia feeling of double focus.} Similarly with the identical twins in CE & TN & the lovers-in-the-dark of MND.

[150] Conclusion of II ought to make something of the catharis of comedy.113 We raise sympathy & ridicule in order to cast them out: this principle gets into the society-spectator dialectic of III & the catharis of comedy concludes III.

[151] IV begins by saying that the action of comedy is a social construct, & hence it enters the order of nature. That leads into the conception of nature in Shakespeare. The man who doesn’t enter the contract is under the law (Shylock) or a noble savage (Caliban) or a melancholy wanderer (Jaques).

[152]                     Tragedy!

I must have this somewhere else [par. 148]: Shakespeare’s histories are intensely conservative, in the Burke sense, with legitimacy & continuity being not merely a steadying but a liberalizing & emancipating force. The revolutionary side of him is in the comedies, where it’s the Los creative revolution through art & not the Ore one.

[153] In your discussion of spectator figures, don’t forget the role of Christopher Sly as a spectator of TS, with his illusionary dream-bride, a boy in disguise like the brides of Slender & Caius.

[154] In comedy the primitive basis is of continuity of life. Falstaff is the greatest comic figure in Shakespeare, & this has much to do with his unquenchable will to live. Parolles in a shrunken form. Hence reconciliation, removal of fear of death (MM) & Prospero’s responsibility for Caliban.

[155] {MW: Ford cured of jealousy (individual), Falstaff of “sinful fantasy” (dual-erotic), Page of trying to marry his daughter to a wealthy fool (social).}

[156]                     not used: rep. Tragedy III

I’ve said [par. 130] that R3 is the first character in the H6 tetralogy to emerge from the historical tapestry as a human being. We don’t like him morally, but we like him dramatically: a sardonic wink to the audience114 puts him in a different class from the other characters. He knows he’s an actor. I don’t mean a stage actor: I mean a hypocrite in its full sense. The others all take life too seriously: they’re too preoccupied with turning the wheel of fortune (at the mill with slaves) to look up at us. Richard’s sense of illusion is what makes him real to us.

[157] Heroism as death & revival incarnates the nation: this is true even of R [Richard] whose [?] dies & is reborn as an aggressive submissiveness.

[158]                     IV.

Connect the garden image in R2 with Prospero’s “trash for overtopping” [The Tempest, 1.2.81] images: the cultivated state of art which is human natural society. Not Eden,115 but under it; not the Ararat world of the T masque either. History theme of coronation-with-pharmakos is underneath the green world: elusive Orpheus in H8.

[159] Patching: the sentimental is the individual equivalent of mob reaction, false introversion as the other is false extraversion.*

The interchange of reality & illusion, without moralizing, creates a moral dialectic.

* opposite of true introversion (self-knowledge and the spectral) & true extroversion (pragmatic society and participation),

[160]                     Patching:

I, i: middle distance perspective.

IV: reality > appearance dialectic (e.g. MV) as part of the conclusion of IV.

I: the ballad disjointing of narrative (Sir Patrick Spens).116 Possible link with the spectator dialectic;
Apuleius world of CE: even the ass transformation is there;
primitive fear of the doppelganger & theme of self-knowledge.

[161] You’ve got P featured in I: could you feature Cy in II a bit more? The songs of clown & death assoc. w. Imogen, for instance.

T seems to fit III & WTIV, though the final [?].117

[162] TS provoked rejoinders but they’re contained in Bianca.118

[163] Primitive fear of loss of identity (Jekyll-Hyde) relieved by meeting identical (i.e. very similar) twins. CE

[164] III: retitle: cf P: “played upon before your time” [Pericles, 1.1.84].

[165] Curious reversal of the roles of Ariel & Caliban: it seems to be Ariel who’s so full of energy & Caliban who wants to dissolve back into the elements, but the opposite is what’s true.

[166] Invariable theme of the harsh father in the four romances: Antiochus, Cymbeline, Leontes, Prospero.

[167] In my Argument of Comedy paper I made a flip remark about there being no second world in the problem comedies.119 In AW the second world is Helena with her father’s secret, the germ of the natural society of the romances (she can restore to health). Collision with artificial society of court: Bertram has the role of hostile father. The MM green world is vestigial, represented by the moated grange of Mariana.

[168] The prison, usually one where the hero confronts death, is part of the dialectic. MM, with the Duke’s curious psychopomp role; Cy, with the oracular jailer; T, where the Court Party is in effect imprisoned.

[169] The fr.-dr. [father-daughter] relationship is, then, always related to the 2nd world, assuming that Isabella’s (ugh) chastity is as much a part of it as Marina’s or Miranda’s. Note the Senior-Rosalind relation in AY. Great to-do about who Perdita’s father is, but the same rejoining theme. Also in Cy when the false mother is expelled. There are of course regular heavy fathers: Polixenes, Egeus, Shylock of the old law, and parody situations like TS, with its (parodied) Perseus overtones. But the point is important because the heroine as black bride, disguised as a boy, is an Eros figure like Puck & Ariel, who are directed by an old man, & who are technically male but to whom the ordinary categories of sex hardly apply. Cf. Cherubino, another androgynous sleeping beauty or Endymion figure, wondering what is “fuori di me” [outside of myself], & thanks to Mozart the most haunting & disturbing of all such figures.120

[170] Well, I’ve got the green world & the closely parallel MV scheme, where Shylock & Portia’s father represent old & new law, justice & mercy, two views of value, the ducats & Leah’s ring vs. the caskets. Here the prison-confrontation with death is a trial. Now: in the romances the green world becomes a natural society armed with magic: it enters & conquers the court, though only through this “real princess” disguise. Belarius in Cy; Bohemia in WT; the island (vs. Milan) in T.

[171] Peroration to P is creative anachronism & dialectic of two worlds; to Cy is rep. [repetition] of MA (Medit.-Atlantic) & historical perspective of 3 Troys & Xn offstage (bring up AC & Antiochus); to WT is the separation of society & idiotes worlds (no voluntary idiotes in WT; even Perdita has to marry, unless it’s the sacrificial victim Mamillius); to T is the leviathan & water business. WT & the pharmakos as state, not as person.

[172] Sea comedies have the theme of perilous landing among enemies (Antonio in TN), an insistence on “perchance” & hazard, & an insistence on madness & hallucination.

[173] The comic paravritti121 isn’t reached until the final marriages have been consummated—in other words, until the heroines get screwed. That’s one reason for the importance of chastity.

[174] In II in IV on the sea comedies:
leviathan arch, [archtype] Falstaff in MW.122

CE: descent into water: the cook.

MV: Argonaut voyage; the shift in fortune

TN: perilous landing

P: Jonah imagery & the ark

T: peroration. If so, preface with the two leviathan quotes;123 if not, follow with them.

[175]                     I.

Ass-patching: cf. the managerial role of Gower with that of Jonson. Gower is oracular: you must accept the story. Jonson invites you to keep your critical faculties at least half awake.124

[176] Denver: a rewrite of the present IV, a second twist,125 including:

exhaustive analysis of the apocalyptic symb [symbolism] in CE.
of the Biblical imagery in the sea group:

Paul’s journey in Acts. Ephesus.

Esau & Jacob twins. Jonah.

Prodigal Son in MV.

Merchandise & exchange: treasure in sea vs.

    wisdom or kingdom of heaven.

Antiochus-Herod.

analysis of time in CE & T.

[177] What does the word Pericles mean? Or is it intended only to contain the English word “perils”? Does it mean “far-famed”?126

[178]127 L. [Luvah]

TC: the Greek conference is pure de facto strategic power: the Trojan one is a de jure rational analysis overruled by what we’d call existential absurdity.

[179] Ur. [Urizen]

In the daylight world of history, Owen Glendower’s magic is merely a neurotic obsession, and Hotspur’s contempt for music & poetry is a sign that he belongs wholly to nature as an amoral force. He loses because, like Troilus, he has too little sense of cosmic order.128 The de facto heroes are H4, H5, Octavian & Ulysses.

[180]                     Ur.

H5 is a problem play in the sense that we may not like its hero & may feel that the “original audience” did. The wheel of history always has utter ruthlessness at its nadir: every crest sits on top of a prison.

[181]                     Th. [Tharmas]

1H4 is a very great play; 2H4 interesting chiefly as showing Shakespeare’s approach to a pot-boiler: fake history, rewritten comedy (Falstaff’s corrupt recruiting methods are made with great energy & point in the first play). The main structural principle is the dialectic with the real father-figures, H4, Falstaff, & the Chief Justice. The scenes with Doll Tearsheet are well on the way to the brothels of MM & P.

[182]                     Ur.

H5: Note the phrase “disguising nature” & later “defective nature” in Burgundy’s speech,129 to indicate what order of nature we’re in.

[183]                     Ur.

The categories of tragedy are being and time, which is why I think Heidegger ought to be able to tell me something about tragedy. Being is the “Apollonian” static order of nature and degree; time is the “Dionysiac” action that runs across it horizontally.130 Ulysses’ two speeches.

[184] Time is really action occurring linked in the rhythm of time as we know it: the linear time which is not exactly clock time, but still has the kind of rhythm symbolized by the tide: Brutus, Antonio. The Augenblick131 or moment of fortune. It’s always wrong, hence the beat of time in tragedy is drunk or mad. Time in comedy is faerie time, the leisurely sensual moment that brings revelation out of complexity. Time in comedy is thus in counterpoint with the action & the being [becoming]: time in tragedy syncopates against being. P.R. [Paradise Regained]: Satan’s subtlest speech.132

[185]                     Th.

The legitimacy principle in evil: Joan of Arc to Margaret and the Thane of Cawdor from Macdonwald to Macbeth. Parody of death & revival.

[186] Three lectures, maybe: The Tragic Order, focussing on the conception of nature in Lear & the great bond in Macbeth; The Tragic Action, dealing with time & perhaps focussing on the parody action or time out of joint in Hamlet; The Tragic Image, focussing on the Egypt-world background of AC & perhaps dealing with the tragedy-romance progression.

[187] You’ll have to use your Beddoes point133 about the grotesque being the sense of the interpenetration of life & death.

[188] Note the emphasis thrown on explaining everything at the end of Hamlet, corresponding to the adjournment of the cast in comedy. In some respects we feel that the play Hamlet is actually the story told by Horatio. Is this done in other plays, or is it specific to the sense of Hamlet as a “problem” play?

[189] The passing over somebody by an “election”: opening of Othello, Hamlet, the same in Act I of Macbeth which reminds me of PL.V [Paradise Lost, bk. 5]. Antony & Caesar. Something very central to tragedy here. The reverse of it is the settling on somebody for a sacrificial election.

[190] The scholars are inclined to discount Shakespeare’s direct knowledge of Seneca; but that he knew about Senecan themes is clear enough. The opening scene of TAnd is the Hecuba theme of sacrificing a son (Astyanax?) to appease a ghost; Tamara’s reaction is like Medea. The pagan sacrifice suggests a “scourge of God” feeling to the play like Tamburlaine. The squabble over burying Titus’ son, too, is intensely Classical, whether strictly Senecan or not: there’s what seems like an allusion to Sophocles’ Ajax in the dialogue.

[191] Election: there is the passed over figure (cyclic) & the rejected figure (dialectic): the pharmakos Falstaff. The two Cawdors in the Macbeth scene: perhaps H4 is passed over by H5 in favor of the chief Justice. Not exactly passed over, but succeeded, anyway.

[192] I think of three lectures if I can get away with three: if four, I might string them along the two axes. Order & action are the speculation axis of space & time:134 the former I have most of the material for now. The other two would be Image (object) and Character (subject); only the latter, presumably the last, would better be called The Tragic Identity.

[193]                     Ur.

Tragic identity has to do with rejecting the ego-self as unreal or, more accurately, committed to something demonic. It’s connected with the fact that one’s reputation is closer to being one’s real self than one’s inner character, which ultimately isn’t there. Hence the desire of Hamlet & Othello to have their stories told about them after their death: hence the fear Cleopatra & Macbeth have of being held up to a derisive gaze. Being as reputation is “Apollonian.” Othello in Aleppo.

[194] I must be careful with this, though: two things seem central to tragedy: election or choice which excludes other possibilities & so repeats the original sin of getting born (Augenblick)135 and integrity, or the (illusory) desire to achieve something & leave something behind. In the other notebook I’ve noted two forms of this, Greek rather than Shakespearean: the effort to achieve a deed of glory by killing somebody, & the desire, if one is killed oneself, to get definitely buried or planted somewhere, not dissolving into a flux.

[195]                     Ur. except for TAnd.

The gods are essential to Greek tragedy, which without them would be purely ironic. They extend the aristocracy: the only check on their seduction of women is the slave-owner’s check: what children result from it are mortal, or slaves. The gods lose their sons in the Trojan war. In Shakespeare the gods are replaced by the order of nature: whatever is “Dionysiac” is purely human, at most ghostly. TAnd. says little about gods, but otherwise it’s Shakespeare’s chief link with Classical tragedy, corresponding to CE in comedy. There, I got finally more impressed by the differences: I may here too.

[196] Characters in tragedy are polarized around the order-figure & the action-figure. The order-figure is the person, usually good, who has accepted a prominent place in the contract: Duncan, Caesar, Octavius. The action-figure, the primary tragic one, is normally the rebel against the contract, who starts a mechanical process going by his rebellion. Lear does this when he abdicates; Claudius forces Hamlet into an uncongenial mechanistic revenge-role by it. A curious moral deadlock is characteristic of the action-figure: Brutus, Bolingbroke, even Claudius, are not reducible to moral categories. We have the order-figure, Hamlet’s father, Duncan, Caesar; the rebel or action-figure, Claudius, Macbeth, Brutus; and the nemesis figure, Hamlet, Macduff, Antony.136 Similar sequence in Lear in Gloucester, Edmund & Edgar. Quite different of course from the election triad: the chosen one, the passed-over one, the rejected one. Lear chooses Goneril & Regan, rejects Cordelia, & passes over himself.

[197]                     Ur.

The order essay will start with the Greek contract & the role of the gods. The gods are nature-principles, & in the Elizabethans the gods are replaced by the order of nature.137 The different levels of this: Lear & the plunge into nature. Then the difference between the ideal divinely sanctioned order symbolized by de jure right & the actual de facto power structure. The irony of Ulysses’ speech on degree when it’s Achilles he’s talking about. Macbeth is a pure de jure situation & the “great bond” is ideal. R2 is ordinary history. The de jure aura clings to the de facto hero: loyalty to him is an existential principle, & disloyalty to Antony, who’s anything but the Lord’s anointed, destroys Enobarbus.

[198]                     Ur.

The fear that no clear line exists between de jure & de facto is itself part of the tragic situation, part of the separating analogy in which might imitates right. The romantic quest imposing itself as victory, as in H5, where France is sick but we see only the exhilarated English side, is in a sense pre-tragic.

[199] I suppose the tragic images are mainly those of war in the members: the conflict of emotion & intellect in AC, for instance. The corruption group belongs rather to the ironic grotesque. Storm & tempest images are those of the loss of identity & of the dissolution of the order of nature. Many communion images where the king is the body: the first part of Timon is full of them.

[200] Nietzsche contrasts Apollo & Dionysus as plastic sculptor-god & music-god. But of course Apollo was a god of music, & the opposition is between the intellectualized music of “harmony” & the actual process music of discord.

[201]                     Ur (Th).

Shakespeare’s tragedy was born out of history, & history shows periods of disorder intervening between periods of comparative stability. An earlier period is likely to be idealized, even if it was in itself quite disorderly, as the time of R2 becomes to the rebels against H4 & H5. So the tragic structure begins with an “Apollonian” figure who preserves the harmony of nature. He may be a tyrannos, but once in power, if he takes his responsibilities seriously, he acquires the de jure magic. York transfers his loyalties in R2; Enobarbus is destroyed by his disloyalty. Paradise metaphors: H4 succeeds to R2’s garden; Claudius leaves Denmark an unweeded garden; H5 conquers the world’s best garden & describes a plot against him as a second fall of man. This last touches on the difficult point of the traitor, who is the most cursed of all men because he refuses to play the game of history.138 Exton wanders with Cain & H4 dodges responsibility; Jack Cade goes straight to hell because he’s low-class, E4 [Edward IV] straight to heaven because he’s high-class. Again there’s a principle that things as they seem to be are more real than things as they are.

[202] The tragedy-figure, the character who brings about the tragic action, is a demonic Son or Dionysus figure, seizing the moment that may be best. Often he’s passed over by election, like Macbeth, Iago, & Hamlet: Lear passes over himself; so in a way does Antony. Morally he’s anything from Hamlet or Brutus to Iago or Macbeth. Anyway, he destroys the Apollonian father-figure, and brings into the action a tragic Spirit or nemesis-figure, who restores order & balance, but lowers the contract with nature from harmony to law, a mechanical rather than organic relation, & so leaves the tragedy on the verge of the ironic vision. JC shows the progression most clearly in Caesar, Brutus & Antony. In Hamlet the moral progression is ghost of Hamlet’s father, Claudius & Hamlet, but there’s a subsidiary one in which Claudius, because king, is the Apollo figure, Hamlet the tragic actor, & Hamlet’s nemesis Laertes: this is the Wilson Knight view of the play.139 Othello is the most terrifying of all the tragedies because there is no nemesis figure, nothing to suggest a restoring of balance. {A lot of pseudo-difficulties arise through assuming that every tragedy is centred on a “hero,” & that the character the play is named after is this hero.}140

[203] This progression of three figures is experimented with in a great variety of ways: the action or nemesis figure may cooperate with part of his victim. Thus R2, being his own worst enemy, is both ruler & action figure, & Bolingbroke both action (usurper) & nemesis (balancing ruler) figure. Othello is partly self-betrayed, hence Iago incorporates a demonic nemesis. But of course Lear is par excellence the king who destroys himself and also acts as his own nemesis figure, the threefold progression being confined to Gloucester, Edmund & Edgar. (Of course the daughters of Lear take on action & nemesis qualities, though mainly by projection). Edgar’s final speech expresses the shortening of vision from the organic to the mechanical that is the tragic progression from balance to renewed balance.

[204] The action-figure is not always Dionysiac, but often represents an automatic force of nature set going by some weakness in the order-figure. Bolingbroke, like Marvell’s Cromwell,141 is a natural force of this kind, but his main links are with nemesis or neo-Apollonian attributes. Cleopatra is the one great Dionysian figure. Study Chapman’s Bussy Ambois as a natural force of this kind.142 In TC Ulysses proposes to bring back Achilles by talking about the order of nature: Achilles is a natural force all right, but of course a purely destructive one. The order-figure is really the being figure, the action-figure the time-figure, and the nemesis figure the identity figure, in a tragic context.

[205] What has the identity-figure lost that the being-figure had? What accounts for “We shall not look upon his like again,”143 for the last two lines of Lear, for our feeling that Octavius is a smaller man than Antony? Inwardness, I think: it’s for the identity-figure particularly that the persona of reputation is more real than inner being. It’s what Hamlet, & Othello in his Aleppo-speech, have to settle for: the kind of figure who can survive a tragedy is a figure whose poetry has been excreted out of him.

[206] The moral vision is the ironic vision, and our own age has produced two types of anti-ironic movement. One follows the comic rhythm of redemption through a social contract, & in their different ways both Marxism & democratic thought follow this direction. Modern German culture produced the heroic & tragic philosophies of Nietzsche, Adler, Heidegger & to some degree Spengler, which are closer to being commentary on tragedy. I must look into the conception of “Verfallen” in Heidegger.144

[207] In my young days I said that Marlowe’s characters were demigods moving in a social ether, that Webster’s were “cases” of a sick society, & that Shakespeare was the transition from one to the other.145 Well, it’s true that in DM [The Duchess of Malfi], for example, there is no order-figure because there is no genuine society: there is a Dionysiac health-figure instead, the Duchess herself, & society itself, personated by Ferdinand & the Cardinal, is the action-figure.146 I think that this is the kind of tragedy adumbrated by Chapman in B d’A [Bussy D’Ambois]. Yet even Tamburlaine is a scourge of God, the destructive nature let loose in a society that has no God. I suppose Shakespeare’s nearest approach to. a social tragedy of the Webster kind is really Coriolanus rather than TC: Co has no de jure magic because he can’t crystallize any kind of society, as Antony can.

[208] The principle that tragedy yells bloody murder & therefore civilizes mankind by sapping its courage is very important, & is connected with the process of squeezing poetry out of the characters it destroys. The articulation of suffering is a central aspect of human awareness.

[209] Often we are led to sympathize with the action-figure simply through our distaste for the order-figure, or the order he represents. No clear example in Shakespeare, perhaps: Hotspur comes close.147 Linked with my point about our sense of gratitude, in reading the Inferno, to the people of Dante’s Italy who placidly went on sinning.148

[210] The modern German tragic theorists I mention [par. 206] are obsessed by the “hour of decision” stuff, which is Shelley’s Eros deification of the hour. It goes back to Satan in P.R. [Paradise Regained] saying you do things when it “may” (not must) be best.149 The totally illusory nature of choice & decision seems to be part of tragedy. Curious how energetic & full of decision & courage the people are who can’t form a society & have no de jure aura about them: R3, Macbeth, even Coriolanus.

[211] Shakespeare never tried a domestic tragedy, just as he never tried a comedy of manners. Othello is almost a parody of a domestic tragedy. He needs a public perspective. Again, he doesn’t try the Italianate tragedy of blood, with its rotten society or court, its melancholy villain, its avenger & ghost—Hamlet is almost a parody of that. Like Chapman, he needs the royal order-figure.

[212] The “moral” of a tragedy is ordinarily the plot or situation it illustrates, like the moral of Women Beware Women, which turns on a tragic vice who happens to be female.

[213] Man is a homo ludens: all the forms of society are rules of games.150 Seriousness relates to content. If the play is a contest, one makes a serious effort to win. That’s why all the world’s a stage: one plays parts, but makes serious attempts at consistency & vividness. There is the ritual game of data, of social & religious conventional action & belief that we have to pretend to accept at least, & there is the game of facta, of what one can choose & do for oneself. In tragedy data & facta usually collide: the commonest form of this is the conflict of the data of honour or duty with the facta of love or passion. The existential doctrine that there are no necessary rules, only chosen ones, is implicit in tragedy, because of the immense foreground strength of the facta power. Shakespeare is much more interested in the Apollonian side of things than, say, Webster or Tourneur or Ford or Middleton. Chapman is even more so: his Senecan Stoicism really amounts to an obsession with authority. Yet his Bussy plays, especially the second,151 are inconclusive arguments contradicted by the action. Clermont, being a Stoic, believes that his data & facta are the same thing, & then he kills himself because he can’t survive his patron, whom he calls his creator after he’s just explained that the universe is.152 (Something here links with my point that belief in religion is grace & the will to believe produces anxieties).

[214] There’s a convention in the tragedy of blood to hook a melancholy person unwillingly into the action: Bosola, Bussy, Vendice. Hamlet is, again, a kind of parody of this.153

[215]                     Th.

As compared with his contemporaries, Shakespeare’s sense of tragedy is much more firmly rooted in history, and he lacks the moralizing tendency that makes Tourneur call his characters by such names as Lussurioso & Ambitioso.154 Hence he does illustrate my point about tragedy being closer to a reality-principle than comedy. Outside him, I’m not sure that that’s true: there’s just as much fantasy & manipulation in Tourneur or Ford as there is in Shakespearean romance. Shakespeare’s tragic vision also has something to do with his adherence to popular theatre: he has a public sense of dramatic action, not a ruminative psychologizing one.

[216] One, or two, reasons why this is not an age of great tragedy are improved methods of contraception and of police investigation. In The Changeling two people are arrested for murder on the ground that they left town the day the murder took place: one needs ghosts of victims & confessions by the guilty to improve the quality of detection.

[217] TAnd is not really a brutal play: none of its mutilations are applauded by the cast as acts of justice. In Ford’s TPSW [’Tis Pity She’s a Whore] an amiable & harmless old woman who has connived at the heroine’s incest first of all has her eyes put out, & then, as an applauded act of justice, is led out to be burned at the stake.155 That really is brutality. And Hamlet’s excuse about postponing Claudius’ murder until he’s sure to go to hell is nothing compared to what the villains in Tourneur & Webster do. We expect a very high standard of sensitivity from Shakespeare, even the sensitivity of readers who on the whole don’t live in tragic worlds. We understand, but don’t realize, Dekker’s remark: “There is a hell named in our creed, and a heaven, and the hell comes before; if we look not into the first, we shall never live in the last.”156 Several tragic dramatists, especially Webster, pick up M’s [Marlowe’s] remark in Faustus.

[218]                     see if can use

Why do the jokes of fools in Elizabethan drama conventionally take the form of pseudo-syllogisms? Is it only because parodies of what one learns in school always seem particularly funny? Or is there some unconscious underlining of the central effort of a play to make an absurdity, whether tragic or comic, rhetorically convincing?

[219] A manipulated tragic situation is often one where providence or Heaven or some power overreaching Nature takes a hand in the action, & functions as the eiron. Many dramatists put up “Danger: God at Work” signs:157 there’s a good example in Ford’s TPSW [’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.]*

*In both of Tourneur’s plays there’s a muttering roll of thunder when the villainy has really gone too far. The destruction of the existentialist facta by the moral order of the data is a general tragic convention: it doesn’t seem so manipulated if one believes in the reality of order. In Tamburlaine the facta conquer everything except death: Faustus presents what from this point of view is the archetypal tragedy. The Revenge of Bussy needs study, because Clermont’s Stoicism ought to have the tragic situation licked. Bussy’s ghost imposes a factum on him which is really a crippling datum, like Hamlet’s father: it sounds like a Xn authority higher than Stoicism. There’s ironic subtlety in both plays quite missing from Tourneur’s atheist or Ford’s argumentative Giovanni. In other words, the data-facta pattern is a simple one: we can also have imposed facta of revenge or loyalty (Clermont & Enobarbus) or self-created data, as Henry VI does, both of which go wrong, or may do.

[220] The theme of the supremacy of friendship over love, so grotesquely celebrated in Chapman’s second Bussy play, comes into Hamlet as well (Horatio vs. Ophelia).

[221] The chorus of madmen in DM [The Duchess of Malfi] epiphanize a loss of identity: they’re clearly marked as compulsive & revolving around fixed points. They batter the Duchess’s identity in vain, but overwhelm Ferdinand. In The Changeling they’re in a separate sub-plot: they’re supposed to turn up in the final scene, but the denouement doesn’t need them.

[222] The Viceroy of Portugal in the Sp. Tr. [The Spanish Tragedy] speaks of being on the wheel of fortune. Of course foreign conquest is involved here, up to a point (tribute only, as in Cy) but a king normally isn’t on the wheel of fortune unless he’s a weakling, like the Viceroy, or a villain, like R3. Yes he is.

[223]                     Th.

Action-time is always wrong & once the wrong act is performed, it is too late (cf. the rep. [repetition] of “so late” in Sp. Tr. [The Spanish Tragedy] III iii–iv). The order-time that brings murder to light or the “discovery” or anagnorisis into being is part of the ordered eiron-movement, & is parallel to the movement of comedy. Too late means too late to escape the counter-facta movement.

[224]                     see if can use Th.

Of course the revenger is also the scourge of God: that’s how he gets around the Biblical commandment not to seek vengeance. The only one I’ve found who followed that is the (technical) hero of The Atheist’s Tragedy, who is led to the very brink of death before deliverance. Cf. Sp. Tr. [The Spanish Tragedy] III viii. The revenger is often a force of chaos in nature rather than of order, part of the course of fallen nature.

[225] The Sp. Tr. [The Spanish Tragedy] is written in an elegiac, wistful, melancholy style: the tragic lament (yelling bloody murder) is an inseparable part of tragedy. The lament is one of the things it is the function of the chorus to supply.

[226] Order time is always right; action time is always wrong; nemesis time may be either. In Hamlet it goes out of whack; in Macbeth it’s all right.

[227] Marlowe makes Machiavelli ask “What right had Caesar to the empery?”158

[228] I suppose atheist, & Jew too, conventionally meant something like psychopath: they’re pharmakos words, difficult to translate.

[229] The nemesis-action is the return of the order-action, but it’s been affected by the intervening tragic action, morally & in other ways. Andrea in the Sp. Tr. [The Spanish Tragedy] watching the show (quote p. [passage]) although everybody’s forgotten about him. (This is a different point).

[230] We also have tragedies where the only existing order is hostile, indifferent, or malignant, associated with hostile stars, and where the tragic action against it commands our sympathy. DM [The Duchess of Malfi], of course:159 but a king easily controlled by an unscrupulous favorite may be in the position of an irrational law in comedy.

[231] see if can use

The Cardinal, in Shirley’s play of that name, is a well drawn character until the last act, when rape & poisoning destroy the consistency of his character in the interests of a catastrophic plot.160 The convention of a proud cardinal I suppose derives from Wolsey: to a Prot. [Protestant] audience he’s a scarlet-whore figure in his red cloak.161 Shirley, who was a Catholic, simply makes him a disturber of the political peace, with overtones of Richelieu. There’s a convention that one evil act leads to another which enables a dramatist to make his villain do anything bad, especially if a Jew or Italian or “atheist,” but this only rationalizes an inability to keep a grip of the character. I couldn’t be more wrong than when I said it was only in comedy that plot defeated character.

[232] So far from thinking that tragedy is inconsistent with Xy, I’d say that all tragedy is religious. Otherwise, why call it tragic? In the light of what is it tragic to watch Tamburlaine wading up to his chin in blood? If it’s ironic, it’s moral; if it’s tragic it’s religious. The tragic is the heroic in the moral context, the divine man in a place where he turns out not to be divine.

[233] I’ve said that existentialism is an ironic philosophy, & so I think it is. But I need to get a lot of Heidegger’s notions clear for tragedy. The ghost in Hamlet & in Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy & the uncanny call of conscience;162 Sartre’s conception of knowledge as non-being & Hamlet’s soliloquies, etc. Incidentally, a situation in which a philosopher in Germany works out a philosophy of “resolute decision” & then turns Nazi indicates that most resolute decisions are perversities & a philosophy founded on them off its head.

[234] I suppose it would be too easy just to do (1) the order-figure & the cosmology of nature (2) fatal action & time (3) restoration in a fallen world of separated dialectic & sacramental analogy. The background progression I have in mind is (1) the Elizabethan conception of the natural order (2) the existentialist conception of facta or the tragic action in time (3) the tragic contract of nature, man & gods in the Greeks & the theory of tragedy generally.

[235] In Shakespeare’s day history had shown no permanently successful example of a republic. Machiavelli’s principle, that popular governments were unstable & that the stability of a central authority depended on the force & cunning of the prince, seemed confirmed by history. But it was also a generally accepted view that popular support was an essential element in the Tudor-Stuart order: this is insisted on, for instance, in Chapman’s Byron plays. Shakespeare’s reason in the Roman plays for making the common people a mere rabble was not political, but the result of concentrating on the tragic structure. In JC & Co the tribunes are the demogogues: the reverse of the British & English plays, where baronial revolt against the alliance of royal & popular will is the source of chaos. (Not all of this is true, but I’m in some danger of understating the emphasis on “general good”).

[236] There is no such thing as a compulsory source for Shakespeare: whatever he took over from a source (beyond certain very broad structural elements) he was at liberty to reject or modify.

[237] The sententious round-off or wheel-of-fortune comment on a tragedy is subordinated to the tragic emotion itself, which is existential, absurd & directly experienced. This is so true of the end of King Lear that Edgar’s remarks seem irritatingly irrelevant. Cf. Epernon at the end of Act IV of Chapman’s Byron [Byron’s Tragedy, 4.2.305–11]. Fortune is cyclical, virtue dialectical & tragic suffering is the other side of the dialectic.

[238] The “Apollonian” side of Elizabethan culture was based on the principle of individuality through function. The topos of the quiet mind is linked with this. Democracy is a “Dionysiac” way of life: it takes the risk of dictatorship, mob rule & destruction of individuality in order to build up a renewed kind of individuality based on function. Meanwhile, great mass movements threatening to destroy the individual keep sweeping across it.163 In Shakespeare the rabble is an aimless Dionysiac force: the counterpart in society of storm & tempest in nature. Nietzsche says Apollonian man is a dreamer, hence an artist: I’d add that mimesis is the principle of waking dream. The Dionysiac is drunkenness, process (man is not a work of art in the Dionysiac vision, as Nietzsche says: he’s simply part of a process) and ecstasy. Perhaps the more technical meaning of ecstasy in Heidegger & Sartre is linked with this.164

[239] Of course there’s a Dionysiac side to nature too: I’ve mentioned this in connexion with WT & the conclusion of Milton’s Ep.D. [Epitaphium Damonis]. The alliance of nature with order & reason is death-oriented. We’d say “being” instead of nature.

[240]                     II (L)

Suffering is a language, rooted in consciousness: its basis is the choral lament. Action does not suffer: action cannot negate itself & become passion. Action is Dionysiac, a narcotic or anodyne that deadens the sense of what is happening to the individual. Sarpedon’s speech in Homer165 is, almost literally, a bromide. Nietzsche’s got it the wrong way round, I think.

[241]                     Th.

The aspect of Elizabethan imgn. [imagination] that revelled in public executions created the aspect of tragedy that Blake attacked, the lynching mob’s delight in contemplating pain, which means of course that the feeling is aesthetic in the perverted Schopenhauer-Kierkegaard sense. This is the point of the epilogue to the Sp. Tr. [The Spanish Tragedy]. The sense of participation in suffering is real tragedy, the tragedy which is not simply melodramatic. The kind that is becomes a spectacle only: this is why a straight story of a sinner broken on the wheel of justice, archetypes Don Juan & Faustus, tends to become a circus.

[242]                     U.

Nietzsche says of Oedipus Rex that it means that the noble man does not sin.166 I don’t think this is what O.R. means, though doubtless it’s what Sophocles would have meant if he’d been N. But the Elizabethans were fascinated by Machiavelli’s paradox, without altogether understanding that it was his. A man in authority must transcend good & evil if society is to hold together at all. That’s one reason why E4 [Edward IV] dies practically a saint & how H4 can get rid of the blame of murdering R2. This last means: whatever he’s done he’s a quite possible king. This is the weakness of Brutus in JC: he thinks Caesar may become a danger, & he therefore is assuming that society can hold together without a person to hold it together. We do the same: my only feeling on learning that Huey Long had been assassinated was relief167—but there’s more evidence on which to assume this now. Brutus is a modern liberal in a very un-liberal age.

[243]                     (Conclusion of either Ur. or Th.)

The existential philosophers, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, build up structures containing moods or emotional reactions like absurdity, anxiety, nausea, & the like. But that’s because they choose these moods. What they’ve really chosen, as the key to reality, is the tragic structure. Comedy includes the victory of dialectic, hence the essential philosophers, from Plato on, are choosing the comic form. At the moment I’m wishing I hadn’t linked the existentialists with irony, though I think they belong there. The solution is perhaps that there are four mythoi but only two drives, the tragic drive toward the ironic & the comic drive away from it. Existential is a drive towards the ironic, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Sisyphus as a happy man. (This in Shakespeare is the historical turning of the wheel of fortune under the moon, where the past ego is always idealized & the present one a tantalized analogy).

[244] So Nietzsche realizes that Socrates, the eiron of Plato, is a comic figure, that the essential philosophers, from Plato through St. Thomas to Hegel, are comic philosophers, that Euripides is the founder of New Comedy. Thus he has, as I have, a threefold progression. The Elizabethan sense of order is, as he says of the Apollonian, a dream, a deliberately created illusion, a pretence, surviving as late as Burke, that the facade of appearance is real, & more real than anything else. More real than the categories of good & evil, certainly. This dream preserves the principium individuationis, the sense of the delimited ego, just as the Dionysiac breaking down of this reveals the reality of the single person. This is one of the most interesting things in The Birth of Tragedy. In vino veritas: the drunkenness of the Dionysiac ecstasy articulates both the unbearable truth of human anguish (theoretical pessimism of Silenus) and the affirmation of life (practical optimism or gaya scienza). In the Elizabethans this can range from the destructiveness of Tamburlaine to the health & sanity of the DM [Duchess of Malfi]. The former is what N. calls the barbaric Dionysiac: Shakespeare avoids it,168 though there’s a lot of it in a different context in TAth. The latter he avoids even more: AW is actually the closest to it, & it’s not very close.

[245] So the neo-Apollonian movement begun by Socrates, of theoretical optimism (the triumph of science, N. [Nietzsche] calls it: I’d call it the triumph of the essential or the real universal) & practical pessimism (i.e. Druidism or the return of a mass-murdering barbarism), is really a nemesis movement or a restoring of the order & balance. Note that Hamlet, a play thrown on the nemesis movement, is intellectualized to the verge of being a problem comedy. The nemesis movement is a comic one enclosed by tragedy. Brutus regards himself as a nemesis figure, & has similar intellectual problems: JC & H are closely related, but have their double focuses in reverse. Hence the ref. to “mightiest Julius” in H [Hamlet, 1.1.114].

[246]                     Th.

The tragic action-figure is normally a rebel against “Apollonian” order. But in Shakespeare’s history-rooted conceptions of tragedy there’s another figure of enormous importance: the rebel against history, the character who tries to stop the wheel of history from turning. Falstaff is the archetype of this, but Cleopatra has a similar (and more successful) relation to Antony. According to an old hunch of mine, La Pucelle really has this role, in a fragmented way, in H61.1 suppose Jack Cade has some of it, which is why he has to go to hell: the traitor who won’t play the game, like Brutus & Cassius in Dante. Certainly R3 has it: he’s an actor, too cynical to believe in the reality of the historical illusion. R2 isn’t cynical, but he’s sentimental, the spoiled actor, & so also has the role. We don’t find this counter-historical figure in H5 or H8, which are plays about strong, successful, & utterly ruthless kings. In tragedy, Macbeth qua usurper has the role, & Lear plunges himself into it by his abdication.

[247]                     Th.

The counter-historical figure is not exactly Dionysian, but he does express truths that shatter the Apollonian illusion. Falstaff on honour, Cleopatra on duty, Joan of Arc on titles of honour, are right. They may not have the whole truth, but the truth they don’t have is illusory: what they see is unanswerably there, like Lear’s reflections on justice in Act IV & like Brutus’ view of dictators. Caesar, H5, H8, Octavius, are in {the position of Camus’ happy Sisyphus: continuing the illusion is what is real. They are the true actors, putting on the show, proving that all the world’s a stage}.

[248]                     Th.

Among these counter-historical figures {the sentimentalist is more difficult to understand than the cynic, because he doesn’t convey a sense of reality but of a double illusion}. R2, with his Christ-figure fantasies, H6, especially in Part Three with his ineffectual piety, are examples. I think Timon is a sentimentalist; I think there’s a touch of it even in Macbeth, for if Othello is cheering himself up in the Aleppo speech, Macbeth is, so to speak, cheering himself down in his “tomorrow” one. Cleopatra moves from the cynic to the sentimentalist in her death scene, where what she does is put on a tremendous counter-show to history, thereby upstaging Antony, who simply dies as a historical failure. But for Cleopatra all the stage is a world. The two attitudes are the detached & engaged forms of the counter-historical process.

[249]                     Th.

The historical process is a spectacular public illusion, & the two counter-historical movements above are retreats into the individual. The power that makes the wheel of history go round is rhetoric, & the crowd won’t listen to Brutus or Coriolanus, or anyone who isn’t a rhetorician. Ulysses is the order-figure in TC: at least he’s the centre of the group of order-figures, not the actual leader but—rare in Shakespeare—the grey eminence. And of course he’s almost Shakespeare’s definitive rhetorician. The two withdrawals are into satire (Falstaff) or lyric (R2): the spectator views of the ironic & the heroic respectively.

[250] If someone were being hanged outside this lecture hall I should have a very small audience.

[251]                     Th.

The Dionysiac exhilaration at annihilating the individual skirts the fringes of the death-wish of the mob. Nietzsche becomes (involuntarily) a prophet of Nazism; D.H. Lawrence writes The Plumed Serpent. In the Elizabethans the tragic action often expresses this exhilaration in demonic terms: the Aaron169 delight in doing evil. I keep coming back to the death of Jack Cade. Anyway, the discovery of the counter-historical figure is the biggest one so far, corresponding to the idiotes in the Bamptons, & may force me into a fourth lecture. It’s nearer than the tragic action itself to Nietzsche’s Dionysian, just as the historical order is closer to his Apollonian than the tragic order. It should be the basis of II, as nature is of I.

[252] Othello is really the nearest thing to a DM [Duchess of Malfi] structure: Othello himself is the pharmakos of a sick & greedy social order personified by the honest Iago. That’s too strong, but he is a figure of health & exuberance marked out because he’s black. A curious parallel to the Jew of Malta, where the Jew’s villainy seems part of Maltese corruption rather than an undermining of it. Not much here: what point I have is that there’s not only no nemesis figure in Othello but in a sense no order-figure either.

[253] My real theme, then, seems to be: (1) The Tragic Contract (2) The Tragic Action, or The Breaking of the Tragic Contract (3) The Restoration of the Tragic Contract. The first deals with nature, order, the principium individuationis, & leaders de jure & de facto. The second begins with the counter-historical figure & extends it, via the wheel of fortune, to the tragic actor properly speaking. The third deals with nemesis in all forms, from the pleasure of watching executions to the Shakespearean sense of participation in suffering.

[254] I’ve said in the brown notebook170 that such features of life, and of tragedy, as ghosts, oracles, omens, portents, witches, devils & the like are not so much on the boundary of the natural & the supernatural as on the boundary between the perceived & the recreated worlds. This, of course, is putting it in Romantic terms of human creation, & is anachronistic for Shakespeare.* But Shakespeare has grasped what Nietzsche hasn’t grasped: that there’s a dialectic in the Dionysiac, that the loss of individuality can be totally destructive & evil as well as emancipating. My remark about Heidegger fits here too.

* not wholly, if we think also of comedy & romance.

[255] Comedy describes a drive toward identity in which identity ceases to become barricaded or exclusive identity (I am myself) which is symbolized by the ritual-bound humour, & becomes the identity of being-there-with-others—in short, an identity that maintains itself by interpenetration, the emancipated monad as full of windows as a Park Avenue building. Hence the inscrutable identity belongs to the tragic action. For the order of nature, the ability of the leader to keep the wheel of history turning, is itself tragic: it’s the essential tragic contract or sacramental analogy, for only the all-too-human figure: Octavius, Fortinbras, Malcolm—can keep it turning. The divine or titanic or Promethean figure is what gets broken. He’s inscrutable too, but he reveals something behind him, as I’ve said, whereas the wheel-turner is an opaque imitator of God. And hence too the nemesis figure, who restores the contract, is part of the tragedy, & doesn’t make the action comic.

[256] Without the mystery of data, a given order that the tragic action violates, & which it is broken on, there is no tragedy but irony. So I was right in thinking that the Romantic shift to facta, to the man-made structure, is post-tragic, that tragedy is culturally regressive, & that existential philosophy, which throws everything on facta, is ironic & not tragic. In tragedy there is a suspension of decision, for decision is always moral & must be for pity or terror, good or evil, the human or the anti-social. It is the suspension of decision, the sense of being a continuing agent or instrument (“Ripeness is all”) that constitutes the heroic act & the catharsis of the spectator.

[257] The cruder the tragedy, the more the facta depend on superstition rather than religion. Cf. the thundering God in Tourneur with the thunder in JC. Shakespeare deliberately eliminates the religious framework & keeps only the images of cosmological music & the stars. God is as much an interfering nuisance in tragedy as he is in science.*

Ur.171

*The Christian God, that is: the Greek gods are assimilable with the order of nature. {The mystery of data, being at least partly sinister, cannot be defined. This may be the kernel of truth about the inconsistency of Xy & tragedy}. Stoicism, with its Hookerian vision of universal natural law, is a much healthier influence. Everybody cringes at the literal hell in Faustus, & tries to explain it away. Something else suppressed.

[258] I’ve tried to convince myself that the vision of the present ruin of the grandeur of the past in Morris’ medievalism & the Wren churches in The Waste Land was a tragic rather than an ironic vision, because heroic. But I think now it’s just ironic. It isn’t data but facta, Samson’s sprawling corpse in the fallen pillars.

[259] L, I think (more likely Th).

{Dialectic of Dionysus: the swirling mass movements controlled by rhetoric in JC & AC (and in H5) out of which curiously oracular voices emerge (Enobarbus, the you-don’t-die-well-in-a-battle man in H5).} Nobody listens to anybody else, only to the controlling voice: Coriolanus, who has no rhetoric, doesn’t understand why he should be controlled by voices. Ulysses the grey eminence of rhetoric or time & the chain of being. But this as a part of nature has “nothing” for its other side, the world of storm & tempest & extinction of being (Claudio’s speech in MM). Lear on the wheel of fire also, as I’ve said, makes oracular sounds about justice.

[260] Urthona, I think

I wonder if the Dionysian vision, in itself, is really a tragic vision at all. N. [Nietzsche] passes over the fact that the most Dionysian of all Greek plays, the Bacchae, was written by Euripides, & that the affinities of Dionysus triumphant are with the komos-revel. It’s in the comedies, like WT, where Dionysian nature is really released. In the tragic vision natural energy is driving toward winter, hence it’s really storm-energy, nothingness. The triumph of Apollo is what is tragic, & the definitive Greek tragedy, the Iliad, is pre-Dionysian. Some of this is N., of course: he goes on to say “D. [Dionysus] versus Christ,” meaning the affirming of life against the denying of it. Hence he couldn’t stop himself from becoming a prophet of Nazism, just as Yeats & D.H. Lawrence couldn’t. In Shakespeare the Dionysian leader is always what we call a dictator.

[261] Th (some Ur).

There’s some shrewdness in N.’s [Nietzsche’s] remark that Hamlet talks more superficially than he acts.172 He acts as a rebel-figure; he talks as a nemesis. So does Brutus, except that Hamlet’s actual role, confirmed by the ghost, is really a nemesis one & Brutus’s isn’t. His talk is broken rhetoric, not the controlling rhetoric of Antony—I mean Hamlet’s: Brutus is, like most liberals, anti-rhetorical. The nemesis figure, if not possessed by the spirit of vengeance like Tourneur’s Vendice, is apt to be confused by his own vision of justice. Cf. the paradox of Clermont in Chapman. The looking in of the melancholy figure is another rebel-nemesis link: Bosola is a rebel-agent, the creature of Ferdinand, but he talks like a high priest of Senecan law. As I’ve said before, the crudest form of the nemesis vision is the Christian heaven & hell one. Because, being tragic, it’s mostly hell, it not only buggers the tragedy but brutalizes it. Connects with my deus-in-machina point.

[262] Apollonian order is an illusion because the facade or appearance is assumed to be the reality as well. Hence it’s assoc. w. daylight & conspiracy with darkness. At the same time it’s mysterious because there’s a compact in it with a hidden nature & with what replaces the gods. Portents accompany the deaths of order-figures, & their ghosts can walk. Coriolanus has no portents & doubtless no ghost: Caesar, Hamlet’s father, & Banquo & Duncan have.

[263] The liberal who sits & hopes that somebody will assassinate Hitler or McCarthy or Huey Long173 is Brutus without Brutus’ courage & responsibility. He thinks of such people as destroying human relations by engrossing power. That is, essential social relations to him are the personal ones: he has no tragic conception of society. Antony, with his ruthlessness, his use of others (Lepidus) as “property,” his contemptible rhetorical tricks & his exploiting of Caesar’s will is still able to consolidate a society. He never makes a human contact: his loyalty to Caesar is the exception that proves the rule. Even his love for Cleopatra, in the later play, is an impersonal passion rather than anything like Brutus’ feeling for Portia. Caesar does make personal contacts, & makes himself impersonal by an effort of will: as is said, the way to flatter him is to tell him he can’t be flattered, The descent from him, through Brutus & Cassius’ emotional dependence to Antony’s lower analogy of Caesar is the tragedy of historical entropy.

[264] Brutus, & Cassius too, are philosophers & so essentialists: they believe in the reality of abstractions & the relevance of justice & reason to political action. Antony’s rhetoric is concrete, lying, & hitched on to a simple impulse to revenge. Brutus believes in the Augenblick,174 like Heidegger, & so decides to fight the battle at Philippi when he should have stayed where he was. He isn’t essentialist enough to believe in the inevitable victory of dialectic: if he were he could hardly be tragic. But he does make a resolute decision by an act of will, & so buggers himself. Similarly Hamlet tries to wipe out the continuity of his philosophical education & replace it on his “tables” with the simple mandate of revenge. But this inner resolution isn’t so easy.

[265] note Th L.175

Part One:176 The Tragedy of Urizen, or the fall of the father or order-figure. The pattern is clearest in JC, H, & M; more complicated but still there in R2, Lear & perhaps AC. Part Two: The Tragedy of Ore, or the fall of the son or daughter rebel-figure: the hero as Adonis (you must call him a-down-a, as Ophelia says [Hamlet, 4.5.172]). Hippolytus in Euripides; RJ pre-eminently in Shakespeare, & the mother-dominated Coriolanus. Perhaps Othello. Certainly Webster’s DM [The Duchess of Malfi]. Perhaps TC, if we think of Troilus as really central, & the play as a sardonic parody of the RJ situation. Possibly even AC, despite the age difficulties. Part Three: The Tragedy of Tharmas, or the desiccation of the Spirit into the epiphany of law or sacramental analogy: the driving of the hero as pharmakos into chaos. Clearest in T Ath; a major theme in Coriolanus & of course in Lear. Note that JC, M & H are I tragedies with the emphasis thrown respectively on o-f [order-figure], r-f [rebel-figure] & n-f [nemesis-figure]: in a II or III tragedy the n-f, for example, might not be simply that.

[266] Th.

Thus Edgar is a nemesis figure but goes through the III role of scapegoat in the wilderness: Hamlet is sent to England, imprisoned & returns “naked” from the sea & alone. TAth has his chance to be a creative as well as a destructive nemesis, but passes it up. The Tragedy of the Spirit has two parts: the descent into chaos & the establishing of a new created order. The tragedies of the spirit are particularly O, TAth & essential aspects of KL & possibly TC. The opposite side of the dialectic is in the romances.

[267] Revised version: The Urizen group, or JC, M & H, contains an order-figure (Caesar, Duncan, Hamlet’s father), a rebel-figure (Brutus, Macbeth, Claudius) and a nemesis figure (Antony, Macduff, Hamlet). These have a rough father-son-spirit correlation. All three rebel figures are fond of their wives: the nemesis figures are without them. The Ore group, RJ, AC, Co & TC, show a hero in a dying-god role torn between two conflicting parties, with the white-goddess figure attracted to one of them. Romeo’s domestic ties & friendships are with the Montagues, his love & enemy with the Capulets. Antony’s duty is to Rome & Octavia; his passion belongs to Egypt & Cleopatra. Coriolanus’ infernal mother belongs to Rome, his love (for what he loves is his enemy) is Tullus the Volscian. Troilus’ duties and love are Trojan, & he is broken when Cressida, repeating Helen’s movement in reverse, slips over to the Greeks. The Tharmas group, Lear, O & T Ath, show the hero in a pharmakos role driven into chaos; Lear, Othello & Timon are, like Caesar, Macbeth & Hamlet, in something of a father-son-spirit relation. The Urthona group are the romances. I have always felt that O & Cy (Iago & Iachimo), KL & WT (diptych, storm, bear & sea), TAth & T had particularly close connections.

[268] The Urizen & Ore groups constitute the cycle of tragedy, the Apollo-Dionysus cycle. One side of it never escapes from time, or the other side from death. The next two make up the dialectic: the ironic pharmakos chaos side, the negative Dionysus, & the romantic reconciliation side, the Orpheus or positive Apollo. Three lectures & an epilogue: the third has most of the “existential” stuff.

[269] check R2 for Abel: the Cain is at the end

How often the struggle of brothers theme turns up in Shakespearean tragedy! Trace of it even in JC with Brutus & Cassius. Macbeth passed over for Malcolm by Duncan. Hamlet & Laertes, linked through Ophelia. Coriolanus & Aufidius, lovers. Antony & Octavius, linked through Octavia. Edgar & Edmund. Romances too: Prospero & Antonio; Polixenes & Leontes. Trace of it in the killing of Cloten by Guiderius. Histories: E4 [Edward IV] & R3; John & Faulconbridge. Esau-Jacob pattern in a lot of them. They symbolize the interlocking commas of yin & yang.

[270]                     L.

The Ore group heroes are all young except Antony, but Antony, whom Plutarch calls a new Bacchus, is the most Dionysian of them all. Trace at the end of AC the imagery of sparagmos & dissolution of identity, of assimilation to archetypes, &, clearest of all of the plays, the separating sacramental analogy. Enobarbus’ phrase “the tailors of the earth” would make a good Ore chapter title, or even a book title.177 Wonder if Shakespeare’s studies in Plutarch extended to Isis & Osiris? Ophelia drowns picking Osiris pricks. Eros in AC.

[271]                     Th.

Note that nemesis is not revenge, but only the specific kind of revenge in which the avenger really is an instrument of order. An avenger may be a bad nemesis just as R3, or R2, can be a bad order-figure. Nemesis is thus the assuming of a principle of order in revenge: without it the tragedy becomes either melodramatic blood & thunder (cf. the Sp. Tr. [The Spanish Tragedy] w. Hamlet) or a Tharmatic tragedy like O (cf. Rymer’s moral outrage over that play).

[272] Supernatural appearances (except for the Hercules episode in AC) are confined to the Urizen group: even KL, titanic as it is, has no ghosts. This is partly, as I’ve said, because the order of nature is involved with the order of society. But it’s also that the “real” world is also, as N. [Nietzsche] says, an illusion: the existential is absurd, not ordered.

[273]                     L.

Dionysian sense that man is infinite in his desires, which may be evil. If he’s infinite in desires he thinks evil, he’s demonic, in his own mind. Macbeth cheering himself down, deliberately impelling himself to murder, vs. Claudius. Strong link between Macbeth & the Dionysian group: Macbeth mentions Antony & Caesar. Also woman-dominated, Lady M. being the genuine form of all the witches & Hecate apparatus.

[274]                     L.

RJ: it looks like a comedy gone wrong, with Capulet as a senex iratus & Friar Lawrence in the tricky slave role. If Friar John only hadn’t been isolated by the plague things might have worked out. But it’s obvious that the sense of tragic fatality doesn’t depend on it. As the prologue makes clear, the will to feud demands a sacrifice.

[275] In Seneca the gods have effectively disappeared & the social contract has not yet fully emerged. Heracles vs. Hercules Furens.178 The anti-Senecan twist in the second Bussy play. Clermont & Enobarbus raise problems. The Stoic reality is essential, therefore an illusion of what N. [Nietzsche] calls Socratic man.

[276] The three lectures, if there are three, ought to be a progressive discovery, avoiding all moral pitfalls. Revenge is “evil” because God says vengeance is mine, but the Xn God is so barbarically sadistic, extracting infinite torments for finite offences, that any moral principle here vanishes at once. Tragedy has quite a struggle with the essentialist Xn trdn. [Christian tradition], which is a comedy in the salvation-redemption part of it & so infinitely below tragedy in the hell part of it. There is of course a less official view of Xy, an existential view founded on the experience of Christ, which makes tragedy more functional.

[277] In Eliz. tr. [Elizabethan tragedy] the social contract takes the place of the old gods, hence while it may have Senecan features it is certainly not Stoic. Detachment is impossible: the peculiar & partial group, the English as against the French, is the social reality. Brutus is a Stoic, & he’s utterly lost in Shakespeare’s world. That’s why Enobarbus & Clermont are so important. In Eliz. tr., where music & ghosts are attached particularly to the order-figure, the sense of the infinite is in order at least as much as in rebellion. And the fact that order is an illusion as well as reality gives the lowering of the analogy in the last two lines of Lear, the sense that the only golden ages are lost ones.

[278] Banquo’s ghost walks, instead of Duncan’s, for two reasons: (a) the emphasis on the quiet & rest Duncan has achieved by getting murdered (b) the fact that the reigning sovereign descends from Banquo, which makes the latter the real order-figure.

[279] mostly L.

I think I see the transition from I to II now: I deals with order as reality, the death of the rebel-figure being right & inevitable. II deals with it as illusion, in the particular situation of being split, so that you have to choose a reality. Here the rebel-character becomes sympathetic, & the order mechanical, impersonal, illusionary. The religious perspective goes here, with the points about the subordination of religious to political reality (the proud cardinal), the religious nature of tragedy vs. irony & moral, the sub-tragic nature of the Xn God, & the way that religious values seem merely to rubber-stamp political ones. The essential contrast is between the hostile Dionysian figure properly ended by order, & the sympathetic one sacrificed by a schizophrenic machine. Chapman’s Byron vs. his Bussy. The Adonis figure in Ophelia’s songs is the pathos of useless death. (Polonius, the father murdered by Hamlet, is also linked to JC).

[280] Now if I could work out the relation to III I’d be, in Coleridge’s sense, finished.179 The counter-historical figure is certainly involved in III. The middle figure is the time-figure, a rebel in Apollonian contexts, a victim in Dionysian ones. The wheel turns uniformly: once there’s a split, as when Lear divides his kingdom, time produces victims rather than rebels. I don’t quite see the white goddess’s role in all this: I think the two aspects of the w.g. [white goddess], possessed & elusive, may be the key to the split. Well: the third figure is nemesis in the Apollonian groups, & the smaller survivor in the Dionysian: Escalus, Octavius, Aufidius, Diomede. But this figure is really the identity figure. The great pharmakoi, Lear, Timon & Othello, turn the whole order of nature inside out into themselves: destruction, madness, unreality, all result: nothing is left but temporal continuity, the wheel of fortune become a wheel of fire, the hell of Macbeth’s tomorrow speech, grasping the skirts of a vanished Cordelia or Desdemona. I see dimly how that could lead to IV, where time becomes redemptive. In I reputation/social appearance, outward aspects, are what is real: the tyrannos is inscrutable: only the Tharmas group take us into the subjective identity. I start with the counter-historical figure because inwardness destroys history, puts a spoke in the wheel of fortune.

[281]                     Th.

The pure appearance of history, the turning wheel, becomes illusion. Lepidus in AC: a third of the world going off drunk. But subjective reality, or inwardness, is illusion too: in fact it’s demonic possession, the Valley of the Shadow, Lear’s pursuit of his nature. Data (de jure) & facta (de facto): neither is ever pure. N. [Nietzsche] speaks of the oracular truth coming out of the Dionysian chorus: this comes out of Lear’s meditations on justice too. But the theme of demonic possession needs study: the chief non-Shakespearean Tharmas play is Faustus.

[282] Antony, Malcolm, Hamlet, are identity figures in a nemesis context, just as Brutus, Macbeth & Claudius are time-figures in a rebel context. Romeo, Troilus, Coriolanus & Antony are time-figures in a split & displaced order, hence sacrificial figures. Here identity figures are surviving figures. So while Lear, Othello & Timon are identity-figures, their context isn’t necessarily one of nemesis or survival. They’re preoccupied with justice, in a mad way, & the paradox of trying to achieve justice through revenge. (Largely rep. [repetition]).

[283] Most of the blood-&-thunder qualities said to be Senecan are generalizations from one play—Thyestes. Seneca’s plays are rewritings of Greek tragic themes: what they add is a more explicit sense of natural law to replace ananke [necessity], a tendency to put gods & men on the same moral level, & a melancholy tragic tone derived from the sense of deterioration brought about from the feeling of the moral obliquity of revenge. This appears in Shakespeare as the sense of the lost golden age in history. The act of revenge has a mechanical quality in it that is part of law, but not of the self-identity with law. Note that the melancholy sense of the one-directional quality of life (Old Wives’ Tale) is not tragic. Tragedy implies violence, waste, a resolute decision (i.e. a perverse one)—in short, sacrifice. Revenge is sacrifice, usually to a ghost.

[284]                     Th.

{Violent death is untimely180 death: in tragedy we always come back to the attack on time. Murder is a particularly uncanny crime because of its interference with the inner clock.} I suppose the epiphany of law & the ineluctable event aren’t the same thing, but they seem closely connected, if not identical, in tragedy. The order of data is authoritative but not ineluctable: you can move around in it. The tragic rebellion is the wilful counter-act, the reaction it provokes is ineluctable, mechanical & a moral assimilated to a natural law. Revenge, the assumption that B must die for having killed A, is the central expression of this.

[285]                     Th.

Self-identity with law & order, then, is the ideal personified by the orderfigure. As soon as one begins to reflect, this situation becomes tragic rather than exhilarating. That’s one reason why moral & religious tragedies get so smug & brutal. Loyalty must be unthinking, as Enobarbus discovered: the English are the good guys & the French the bad guys, & that’s it. Hamlet & Brutus, no less than Cassius, think too much. For tragedy to do much effective yelling, we have to split loyalties. All split loyalties become ultimately a split between subject & object: love & duty in the Dionysian group, individuality & social obligation in Lear & Timon: I don’t know about Othello. Antigone is split between an objective command & a subjective feeling of duty.

[286]                     Th.

The Tharmas figure is, of course, what I call in comedy the idiotes, and the equivalent of the clown is the Machiavellian villain. In R3 the connexion with a grotesque181 clown role is very close. Edmund is phlegmatic; in other dramatists the locked-in-melancholy type has the role. The action of Othello is solely between a black idiotes & the villainous honest Iago, reversal of colors from TAnd. This way, the connexion of Poor Tom & Caliban becomes clearer (viz. the root-eating, cave-dwelling Timon). There seem to be a lot of bugs in thinking of O as a Tharmas tragedy: Lear & Timon are all right, but they’re never tempted; demonic possession with them is autonomous. Venetian pharmakos, of course: Jew & Moor, Shylock & Othello. O is certainly linked to the Dionysian group, just as A&C is linked to the Apollonian one. Esau & Jacob (Iago, Iachimo), the former selling his birthright like Lear or throwing it away like Timon & retreating to the desert.

[287] In discussing hamartia in AC I simply called it what Heidegger calls “thrownness”: being put in a certain place.182 The order ideal is, to use another Heidegger term, ecstatic: one is outside oneself in it. The tragic flaw consists in detaching oneself from it: through excess of passion, excess of reflectiveness, excess of physical energy. It’s usually love against duty: even Lear’s abdication is that. But whatever it is it builds up an encapsulated subject. Sometimes one has too much integrity. Coriolanus is said to be too noble for the world, though nobody feels that. Cordelia is the one clear example of tragic victim as martyr; Caesar is too self-contained to be a properly suspicious & jealous tyrannos.

[288]                     Th. (mostly)

To break the ecstatic game is to repeat the fall of man: that’s the point of H5’s remark. The traitor (Brutus & Cassius in Dante, whose morality is barbaric) is the most frightening of criminals; but our doubts are traitors, as conscience makes us cowards. Also the Dionysian conception of nature as finding its fulfilment in the individual disintegrates the contract, even though, like Bussy, such a person recalls the Golden Age. Note that the ecstatic contract exists primarily as a state of war in which one is committed to one side. Hence the servant’s remark in Coriolanus. Enmity is not, like hatred, self-divisive. If there is no ecstatic contract, society must prey on itself, as it does in Webster’s DM [The Duchess of Malfi] or Tourneur’s RT [The Revenger’s Tragedy]. But it still demands sacrifices.

[289] Time: Sonnet 124 & Hotspur’s dying speech.183

[290]                     Th (the Co. remark)

Authority in Shakespeare is always personal, & loyalty is personal. Similarly warfare takes the form of individual acts of heroism: the society is as primitive as Homer. Here again there’s a historical barrier. With us, physical courage in warfare is entirely a matter of organization: if an enemy is demoralized it’s because it’s incompetently led, not because the soldiers are cowards. Even “led” is the wrong word, a survival from Shakespearean days. {Coriolanus is a leader who turns his back on his followers, & so can’t really lead}.

[291]                     Th (some L).

Caesar notes that Cassius thinks too much & doesn’t like plays or music. Not being a real tyrant, he merely notes it & passes on. Music in the Platonic sense of the ecstatic forms, including drama & rhetoric, are [sic] part of the order-figure’s apparatus. So is what Heidegger calls the uncanny call of conscience,84 typified in the walking ghost. The phrase setting the word against the word is used twice in R2 [5.3.122 and 5.5.1314]. In the first use it means word of command: it’s part of the irony of York’s transfer of loyalties. In the second it means koan or subject of meditation: the slogan that unifies, the axiom of faith. Set against another it divides the mind, music as counterpoint but not as harmony, the Schopenhauerian music of the dissonant Dionysian will.

[292]                     L.

I wish I understood MM, because the double role of the Duke, presiding & facing his followers & then mingling disguised among them, recurs in H4 (many marching in his coats), H5 (Harry Le Roy), & A&C at the beginning. Gaesar as Brutus’ evil spirit: in fact the walking ghost is part of it.

[293]                     L (Th).

To live in the ecstatic contract is to keep time, moving in measure like a dancer. To become subjective, whether in a reflective or a passionate way, is to break time. To break, or break into, time is to become aware of time as the anti-creator, that which produces nothing. Study the references to time by Jaques, the idiotes of AYL: the encounter with Touchstone, the seven ages speech [2.7.139–66], time lost to hear a foolish song [5.3.39–40]. His final gesture is a Timon one, though without bitterness.

[294]                     L (I think)

The breach of contract is itself a new contract: the contract of the inevitable consequences of the act. If the act is a mortal sin, the contract may be a pact with the devil; if not, it’s still a pact which is no longer ecstatic, but resolute & so perverted, a contract in which time is of the essence. In a woman it’s the leaving of the ecstatic contract of virginity & entering a moral dialectic (wife or whore), bound to the 9-month time rhythm.

[295]                     L.

Romeo & Juliet are a Dionysian explosion of energy (gunpowder is a frequent image) that is too fast: the delaying tactics of the Friar’s letter (unintentional delay, of course) bring about a too late situation. Similarly with Claudius’ too hasty marriage to Gertrude185 & his too late dealing with Hamlet. Fortune, the fall of the dice, is a measuring of time by synchronization with the order of nature. Octavius has it; Antony, whose deluge “o’erflows the measure” [Antony and Cleopatra, 1.1.2], doesn’t. Ulysses’ speech on time [3.3.145–90] is designed to get Achilles back into the ecstatic contract.

[296]                     Th (I think)

Study the theme of the return from exile in Shakespeare: Bolingbroke in R2, Richmond in R3, Hamlet & Macduff from England, Cordelia from France. Parodied in Coriolanus & T Ath: the Lucius theme in TAnd. Connect with the returning ghost theme.

[297] I’ve gone through TAnd again trying to see whether it’s a Urizen or a Tharmas type: I rather think the latter, because Titus was obviously wrong in not accepting the Emperor’s title, so it’s closer to Lear than to JC. It’s a very academic tragedy, with a great many Luvah themes as well. Could be used, perhaps, in III as a resumé of the whole sequence: of course it’s intensely imitative, like CE in comedy, with all sorts of archetypes mentioned, from casual allusion to functional use, like the reading of the Philomel story in Ovid [Metamorphoses, bk. 6, 11. 422–674).

[298] Th (but keep in mind for L)

In the sonnets one can see very clearly how the ecstatic contract, the poet’s love for the youth, is a contrast to the act of consciousness forced on him by estrangement and neglect, an act which makes him aware of time as nothingness.

[299]                     L.

The order figures in JC, M, & H are murdered rulers; the time-figures are usurpers. Where the order is split, the order-figure becomes an aspect of the white goddess, as in RJ, TC, AC & Co. Here the time-figure becomes a nature too big for his fortunes, just as the usurper attempts a fortune too big for his nature. In TAnd, KL, O, & TAth the order-figure abdicates, & so the Machiavellian villain comes into prominence. Thus my phrase identity figure for the nemesis type won’t do: tragedy falls away from identity: it doesn’t move toward it. So we have: Urizen group, social identity; Luvah group, erotic identity; Tharmas group, individual or idiotes identity. I can’t make much of the nemesis figures in the Luvah & Tharmas groups: they’re mostly just survivors. There’s a male attendant in the Luvah group who points out the nature of the white goddess: Mercutio (Queen Mab speech), Pandarus, Enobarbus (barge speech) & perhaps Menenius. Pandarus & Ulysses are both counsellors, & their parody-parallelism should be noted. Mercutio is killed early, Pandarus & Menenius are cast off, & Enobarbus breaks his heart. Tanist figure. They could go in the third group: they try to bridge the gap of hero & white goddess, or even the first. Thus:

[300]                     Th.

Distinguish the revenger from the avenger, the life-for-life mechanic-legal reaction from the restoration of order, The point of a great deal of tragedy is that they can’t be distinguished, hence there’s a moral obliquity in revenge-vengeance that at best consolidates the action again on a lower level.

[301]                     L.

Note that in Hamlet’s reflections on his mother’s marriage it’s the violation of time, the wicked speed, that bothers him rather than the “incest” itself, which seems more of an excuse.

[302]                     L, mainly

The tanist figure is a counsellor, a grey eminence. Pandarus, & the Luvah Trojan situation he’s in, is a parody of a Tharmas set-up in the Greek camp, where Achilles has abdicated, Ajax is the lord of misrule, Ajax’ fool Thersites has the Apemantus role, & Ulysses has an Edgar architectus role. The Paris-Helen Luvah cycle with Menelaus the nemesis ties the two together. In Hamlet there’s a double Luvah situation, a Hamlet-Ophelia one with Horatio the tanist & Laertes as the nemesis, & a Claudius-Gertrude one with Polonius the counsellor & Hamlet himself the nemesis. Brutus-Portia, Cassius, & Antony; Macbeth-Lady M, Banquo, & Macduff; Othello-Desdemona, Cassio, & Iago. In many respects Othello belongs to the Luvah group: it’s difficult to see the Venetian senate as vested order, even with the senile old pantaloon Brabantio in the middle of it. The rejected counsellor turns up in the Kent-Fool group in Lear & the faithful steward in Timon: God, he’s pervasive. Soothsayers in JC & AC: in a sense the disappointed Ghost in Hamlet; the witches in M. Note that they’re explicitly spokesmen of fate in the Urizen group. Othello has only an evil counsellor: Cassio cannot fill that role. So has Gloucester, in the disaster half anyway. The romance father-daughter theme is in Lear & TAnd, two of the Tharmas group. Even H5 is polarized between two father-counsellor figures, picks one & rejects the other.

[303]                     Th.

The continuing hell: Greek heroes survived as shades, an intolerable notion to Achilles: what they dreaded was what being left unburied symbolized, swept around in an endless flux. From this develops the returning & avenging ghost, & Hamlet’s soliloquy on the possible unfinality of death. This become^ the sense of the never-ending pendulum swing of revenge. In the War of the Roses, of course, & in capsule form in TAnd, where the ghosts of T’s [Titus’s] sons demand sacrifice & provoke revenge: the burial theme turns up there too. Link this with the apostolic succession of evil in M & H6.

[304] There is no full-blown order-figure in Shakespeare, corresponding to H4 of France in Chapman’s Byron plays. Hamlet’s father we know nothing of: Duncan is an attentive & able ruler, but desperately beleaguered & only about to consolidate his power; Caesar is just on the point of entering into his de jure inheritance. All are murdered, & elsewhere authority is split or abandoned. H5 is nearest, & H5 proves that the order-figure depends on a state of war, when men need each other. Thus H5 is a pre-tragic play. Order is always something we have lost or are just about to gain.

[305]                     Th.

There are three primary tragic patterns: the murder of the father, the basis of a rather desperate myth of Freud’s; the sacrifice of the Son, & the isolation or pharmakosizing of the Spirit. The murder of the Father, of course, is more usually a brother than a son, Cain being the primal murderer, as Claudius says.186 What it goes back to, & what Freud buggers around with, is {the Proustian sense of the perpetual decline of order} & the sense that the reality of order never ceases to be illusion. The three tragic structures are the failures to achieve, respectively, social, dual (erotic) & individual identity. All forms of identity are infinites in a finite context. The only tragedy is that no hero is Christ. Yet the drama of Christ was certainly a tragedy, as far as this world is concerned. It was the murder of the primal Father, the Creator of the world, the sacrifice of the Son, & the pharmakosizing of the Spirit. Catharsis, purification or purgation, is in the exhibiting of this tragedy.*

Th.187

* Apparently, whether one succeeds or fails in incarnating the infinite in the finite, the result is tragic, because tragedy exposes the condition of the world. Whatever else is true, the tragic vision is true, and no world outlook which ignores it or explains it away (essential Xy, Marxism and democracy are all un-tragic, & fascism is only a parody of the tragic) can avoid being shipwrecked on its sunken rock. {Of all Christian doctrines, the statement that Christ died is the most difficult to disbelieve.} Xy says Christ achieved the infinite in the finite, but his death was just as tragic as if he had not; consequently it is not the failure to achieve identity that is the essence of tragedy. What is the essence, then? This happens.

[306] Rhetoric: JC seems the only play where its social force is made much of; the only play where its lack is stressed. The soliloquy as an isolating or subjectivizing rhetoric of Tharmas. No, not just JC: I’m forgetting Ulysses [in Troilus and Cressida], & H5. The counsellor or tanist rhetoric is partly chorus comment. Polonius is a rhetorician: like Antony, he pretends to use no art at all. Othello delivers a round unvarnished tale [1.3.90].

[307] Just the same, the one-directional quality of life, experience becoming nothingness, “Thou’lt come no more,” & the “too late” aspect of the fateful event, is damn important in tragedy. Urizenic tragedy, rooted as it is in history, is always a falling from.

[308]                     L.

{Paradox of tragedy: the falling from movement is also the normal direction of time.}188 Order-figures follow the beat of time; they like music, poetry, drama & rhetoric as a rule: they are lucky, because their rhythms are synchronized with the wheel of fortune, & death surprises them: it even surprises Tamburlaine. Hence they’re murdered: they die too soon, Hamlet’s father for confession, Duncan for peace, Caesar for kingship. This starts the Angst going which is the awareness of time. Oh, hell, I’ve got all that: what I want is a theory interconnecting the Father-Son-Spirit conspectus.

[309]                     Th.

The blocking of power produces a split world in which the tragedy of love emerges as the typical force of the new nature thus released. The blocking of love produces a death-wish which becomes revenge, the perverted will to live by willing to kill.*

* Hamlet’s trouble is partly that his love for his mother isn’t wholly blocked but spills over.

[310] Unmoralized nature of tragedy: death is both the punishment of the aggressor and the reward of his victim. Masenia in E’s [Euripides’] Heracleidae.

[311] Wonder if the Byron double play189 is a kind of answer to Tamburlaine?

[312] Long generalized speeches at beginnings of Greek tragedies & various aetiologies indicate the rooting of the tragic sense in history.

[313] The dialectic of tragedy is toward the separation of life under law (temperance or sophrosyne for the individual, justice or equity for society) from death. The heroic, the infinite, the Dionysian God, is what dies. Ordinary people die naturally; a hero’s death has an outrage or the portentous in it, a fall from a wheel. {Such a death may be seen from below as a father, from our level as a son, from above as a spirit}. The form of the fourth is the tragedy of recognition (to recognize is of the gods, Euripides says in Hecuba).

[314] L, basically, though it’s in Ur.

Ordinary death is melancholy, but not tragic: tragic involves the exceptional, the outrageous, the young, beautiful, virtuous or heroic, what cannot be accepted morally, only as a fact. This particular kind of event involves a violation of time. External violation in the Urizen group, internal in the Tharmas, natural in the Luvah.

[315] set into Ur.

What Nietzsche saw as the destruction of tragedy is actually the fulfilment of it, the working out of its dialectic, moral law for the survivors & death for the heroes. It’s in the Eumenides & Oedipus at Colonus as much as in Euripides. It’s not in the Iliad, because the Iliad is “unfinished” in the sense that it’s part of a bigger cycle: Achilles doesn’t die: he just gets, like Sarpedon, an intimation of mortality.190

[316] Urizen: Agamemnon arch, [archetype]; Luvah: Oedipus; Tharmas: Antigone.191

[317] Begin Two by talking about the ecstatic contract & the rebel as breaking into time, then by way of your future-too-big-for-nature and reverse point lead into the other aspect of the Dionysian figure, the dying lover. Begin Three by talking about traitors & counter-historical figures, & about Xy & moralized tragedy, ending in the paralysis of nemesis in endless revenge. Try to make the transition from nemesis-figure to abdication-figure: each tries to recover his identity by a destructive or anti-social act, an idiotes gesture. And I don’t know why I keep putting Othello in the Tharmas group & Coriolanus, because of his damn mother, in the Luvah one: they’re the other way round, though the links are there.

[318] It is interesting that Milton ([?]) considered writing a M [Macbeth] in which Duncan’s ghost would appear.

[319] H5 is a Dionysian figure, with Falstaff his Silenus: a destructive figure like Tamburlaine.

[320] The principle of Urthona tragedy is that suffering has been and that time was, but don’t let’s get on that yet. Evil can die: we don’t wake up from a dream or simply get forgiven, but move from a “gap of time” into time itself.

[321]                     Th.

Exton & Cade are tools, yet assumed to go to hell; cf. H5’s laborious argument about the king’s reply. Dissociating of word of command from the commanded is what enables the wheel to turn: the pharmakos is always someone else, a fool of time. Cf. Clarence, 407.192

Alexanders—Second Stage

[322] First lecture done in draft; third, or perhaps the second, still lacking a conclusion; second (or third) still in bits & pieces.

[323] Cyclical imagery: winter in Lear; in Timon 1577. Moon & sun, 1598.

[324] The rhetoric of isolation is particularly the rhetoric of truth, the oracular voice of Lear on justice, Timon on gratitude, & Coriolanus on courage.

[325] Cyclical imagery: chaos & a new creation when one ruler vanishes & another takes his place. R2: new world [5.1.24], a god on earth thou art [5.3.136]. AC: cloud that’s dragonish [4.14.2]; crown of the earth doth melt [4.15.63]. Hamlet: “as the world were now but to begin” [4.5.104].

[326] The progression of Luvah now is clear: Co, with what belongs to Tharmas separated; then RJ; then TC, & finally AC. I need a smash ending for all three of them, of course. There are sticky bits in Luvah, especially the role of the counsellor figure. Falstaff in H5 & Mercutio in RJ particularly. This theme comes to its climax in the being-&-time speeches of Ulysses [in Troilus and Cressida].

[327] And I haven’t yet worked in Christ, the equally tragic aspect of his life, H5’s weaseling speech, & in short I don’t know where I finish. Latter goes with Jack Cade & Exton as tools.

[328] Hamlet’s damn tables.193

[329] Madness & demonic possession: ex. [example in] Tharmas on Lear on heath. Somewhere bring in the triviality of Macbeth’s occult vs. Hamlet’s.

[330] Raising of w.g. [white goddess]: Juliet’s balcony, Cleopatra’s monument, Cressida on the walls of Troy.

[331] Luvah has a major & a minor cadence: the minor one recapitulates Urizen by way of Ulysses’ being & time speeches. Seasonal symbolism, winter & the like, is completed in the ironic vision of continuity, broken in the heroic death: the theme of the breaking of time is reserved for Tharmas. Passion-tragedy highlights the heroic death, & hence is expressed centrally in the lament: speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The tragedy of order involves us as participants, because we’re all under some kind of social order: the fall of the passion-figure is an appeal primarily to the spectator in us. Hence the major cadence of Luvah is the martyred Christ; most difficult to disbelieve point. It’s connected with the major Luvah point about the pharmakos, the expendable agent of the order-figure. Brutus insists on taking repby. [responsibility] for his acts; Hector insists on fair play, but the order-figure has the power to detach himself from his agent: rejection of Falstaff, H5’s speech on war [Henry V, 4.3.40–67], Exton & Cade as across [par. 327].

[332] Minor cadence of Tharmas is the this-really-happens one about Lear: major one is the colossal achievement of tragedy in making the tragic experience a spectacle. The logic of the pure ironic vision is Falstaff’s honor speech: stay out of trouble & avoid heroics. The logic of the pure heroic vision is nothingness. One involves us as living beings; the other involves us as mortals, dying ones. The end of the tragic vision is recognition. The descent into hell has been worth it but if we know we’re in hell we’re no longer wholly there. From here there’s a link to a possible (brief) epilogue on the tragedy of Urthona, tragedy as epiphanic or recognized: the romances as tragedies. The helpless, impotent, fantastic, as redemptive.

[333] The tragedy of passion is a dilemma tragedy: an Antigone or a Neigung Pflicht194 one.

[334] Hero halfway between gods & men: push him closer [to] the gods & his rebellion becomes titanic; closer to man & he becomes representative.

[335] Oedipus: core of the (isolation) tragedy is the vision of identity, finding out what he is.