In Shakespeare's conception of the tragic hero we find many characteristics and some incongruities that belong to the old avengers; but there is new penetration into the sources of human motive that results in an essentially new view of the functions and scope of the tragic drama. As in most tragedies since "Tamburlaine," the play is a one-part play, presenting a hero far above the average in mental and moral power, but for the time mainly under the sway of one dominating mood or emotion. Like the other heroes of revenge tragedies, Hamlet is a good man brought suddenly face to face with evil. Again, like the heroes of Seneca and of most tragedies dealing with a reversal of fortune, Hamlet is a strong man brought to face the enmity of chance. He is an individual forced to struggle against a hostile environment. Again, he is a man in a tragic crisis that requires the exercise of all possible powers on his part if he is to avoid disaster, who finds himself afflicted with a temperamental weakness that makes failure possible or indeed inevitable. Critics emphasize now one and now another element of his character as they emphasize one or another of these conflicts as the most important. Shakespeare here, as again in later plays, united in one hero all the varieties of conflict catalogued by the critics. But if we ask which is most peculiarly Shakespearean, it must be said to be the conflict with his own temperamental unfitness, call that irresolution, melancholy, meditativeness, or what you will. Here lies Shakespeare's main differentiation from preceding tragedy, though one distinctly presaged in "Julius Cæsar." At all events, we have a conception of tragedy carried out in his succeeding plays. The hero, noble and righteous, is brought into conflict with the results of evil and circumstance, and he is crippled by his own inability or weakness. Tragedy becomes inherent in character, in the incompleteness that marks the best and mightiest of mankind.
Our consideration of "Hamlet" has been prolonged partly because its relations to contemporary drama can be traced more readily than those of Shakespeare's other tragedies, and partly because it is the first of his plays to afford a full definition of tragedy, a conception of prime importance both in the development of Shakespeare's art and in the future history of the drama. A sensational struggle is presented, and the abounding incidents are wrought into effective if loosely connected stage-scenes, dealing with material similar to that then current in the theatres,—villains, ghosts, murders, insanity, grim farce, meditations, aphorisms. But the scenic presentation and the dramatic structure are to express not only an external conflict between hero and counter-force, but an inner struggle of the hero himself. They are to be the effects and results, nay, the very mirror of the inner thought and feeling. And the disaster that falls upon the hero and those by him beloved comes home to us as due not merely to external forces or circumstances or to evil working within, but also to an inherent unfitness of his own.
This conception of tragedy found further exemplification in "Othello,"[19] freer from Elizabethan methods than any of the other tragedies, and the most masterful of all as a play. The fable was found in an Italian novella that related, like so many of its class, a bald story of love, jealousy, and villany. The very baldness of the narrative in comparison with the fullness of incident and characterization of the chronicles or Plutarch, gave Shakespeare's imagination an untrammeled opportunity. The ingredients of the story, common in romantic comedy and already combined by Shakespeare in "Much Ado about Nothing," were also not unfamiliar in tragedy, but Shakespeare enlarged and interpreted them to fit the conception of his two preceding tragedies, the presentation of a spiritual struggle in which goodness is attacked by evil at its point of greatest vulnerability. The credulity of Othello, however, is assaulted by a more active agent of evil than in "Julius Cæsar" or "Hamlet." Malignant evil is embodied in Iago, and it is against his machinations that the nobly idealized characters of Othello and Desdemona prove incompetent and defenseless. He is the person who dominates the action and gives explanation and plausibility to the circumstances. He not only opposes the hero in the external action, he creates through his insinuations all the evil suspicions that struggle in Othello's mind. He might almost be considered the protagonist of the tragedy.
In structure there is a notable advance over preceding plays, accomplished apparently in part through deliberate intent. The first act with its account of Iago's craft and the marriage is a distinct introduction. The remaining four acts present a practically continuous action, confined to Cyprus and representing about thirty-six hours. Moreover, by a skillful ambiguity, which Christopher North called "the double clock," Shakespeare, while securing this rapid and uninterrupted process of time, has succeeded in conveying an impression of protracted intrigue and slowly-developing motives. Thus, without lessening the variety and importance of the events and emotions, he gains, by a closer observance of unity than in the other tragedies, a greater degree of theatrical illusion and of dramatic intensity. Again, "Othello" technically is noticeable among the tragedies for its relinquishment of many current methods. It is neither a chronicle history nor a Senecan tragedy. There is no presentation of history and little of court ceremonies. There are no battles, no long exposition, no spectacles, no ghosts, no insanity, and almost no comedy. It has few persons and virtually a single action. The underplot is subordinated and closely united to the main action, and there are no delays and new excitements between crisis and catastrophe as in "Hamlet" and "Lear." Nowhere else in Shakespeare is the progress of character, emotion, and deed toward the final event so consecutive and so uninterrupted. This advance in coherence and proportion seems due less to the contributing causes just enumerated than to the explanation of action by character. Accept the unbelievable malignity of Iago—and you do accept it before you have proceeded far—and every step of the appalling chain of intrigue seems a natural outcome of the motives of the persons before us.
In consequence of this integration of character and action, the characters are, more than in the other tragedies, distinct and unmistakable. As if to make stronger the contrast between good and evil, the good man is a Moor, apparently, as in the case of the Moors in "Titus Andronicus" and "Selimus," hardly distinguishable from a negro; and the bad man is deprived of the motive which in the novella rendered his wickedness intelligible. Yet nowhere, even in Shakespeare, are generosity and greatness of soul more admirable than in Othello, nowhere is villany more human than in Iago. The stage villain here receives his apotheosis as the avenging hero did in "Hamlet." The source of all the evil in the play, the Machiavellian machinator, the subtle hypocrite whose every action is a pose to conceal its purpose, the simulator of honesty and bluntness, the shameless egoist who proudly avows his villany and bawls it to the gallery, the intellectual master who plays every one for a dupe, and especially his accomplice—all this had been embodied in the villains of Kyd and Marlowe. Although intelligible to Elizabethan psychology and theology, and credible in the light of Tudor politics and feuds, such a type would seem to lack enduring truth. While preserving all the attributes of the stage type, Shakespeare made it the means for that searching analysis of human depravity to which his contemporaries were less successfully dedicating their efforts. This soliloquizing devil becomes identified with the suggestions and sinuosities of evil that partake of the flux of our consciousness. Hypocrisy, cynicism, cruelty, the absence of human sympathies, the pride and malignity of intellectual superiority have henceforth their symbol in Iago. Impossible, diabolical, inhuman as Barabas or Richard III, he is never for a moment unplausible, because he ever unearths a corresponding potentiality in us.
The persons of the play, while unusually effective on the stage, and while human and real in their discourse, have a universality of appeal essential in the greatest works of art, desired by Aristotle and dimly foreshadowed in Elizabethan efforts after greatness and typicality. Othello, Desdemona, and Iago create fresh reflection and new impulse in every reader of every generation. And to each they are not only real persons but also symbols and ideals of the generosity, sweetness, and iniquity of the universe. This idealization of character is accomplished with wonderful clarity by means of an expression, splendidly eloquent, untroubled by conceit or obscurity, equally masterful in prose or verse, magnificently adapted to the representation of every mood or temperament. Shakespeare here realized the ideal toward which English tragedy under the leadership of Marlowe had been struggling, the presentation of human greatness in blank verse beautiful and dramatic.
If "Othello" is comparatively free from current conventions, "Lear" is in many respects the most Elizabethan of Shakespeare's tragedies. Story, themes, situations, stage effects constantly recall the plays of his predecessors; and if his creative imagination here attains the most astounding triumph in all literature, it cannot be said to free itself entirely from a confusion of archaisms and absurdities.
Returning to English history, Shakespeare selected a story that had outgrown the chronicles and been narrated by several poets and in one drama. From the early "Leir" he took a few important hints, but he treated the material of the chronicles with a freedom which both its obviously legendary character and its remoulding by other poets permitted. He was only slightly concerned with the presentation of history and hurried over the battles and the shows, the still indispensable accompaniment of historical plays. He was concerned solely with the tragic entanglements of character, with the devastations of evil and folly.
The kernel of the story, Lear's trick and Cordelia's unsatisfactory reply, though possessing a kind of objectivity suitable for the stage, is of itself so absurd and childish as to impede illusion of truth. Its development is full of inconsistency, and the interwoven themes of madness, villany, lust, ambition, family feud, and ideal virtue suggest no break from the Elizabethan canon of tragedy. To the story of Lear and his daughters, Shakespeare added the still more childish parallel story of Gloster and his sons. This common device of a reinforcing sub-plot is here extended to every situation and motive. Even the devoted Kent is balanced by Goneril's faithful creature, Oswald; the inhuman sisters are supported by the machinating Edmund; and, most extraordinary of all, the assumed madness of Edgar becomes an accompaniment for the real madness of Lear. The elaboration of the sub-plot causes an unprecedented complexity of persons and events, and it dislocates the structure. The intense interest which is absorbed in the sufferings of Lear finds itself distracted and dissipated in a medley of incidents so incongruous and so confusing that one wonders how a rational mind could have selected them. The crowded scenes which separate the climax of the third act from the catastrophe assuredly form one of the least happy instances of the Elizabethan habit of introducing a change of interest and a variety of incident in the fourth and fifth acts. Yet the structure of the play, if far from faultless, reveals amazing mastery. The development of the action in the first three acts with the constantly increasing tension of feeling, and the final gathering of all the different actions in the wonderfully condensed catastrophe, are among the greatest achievements of dramatic plotting. Moreover, in spite of his zest for crowded and diversified action, Shakespeare's feeling for unity of emotional effect caused him to omit one motive that modern renovators have never been able to forego. He found a place for battles, villany, childish intrigue, the clown's songs and jests, the plucking out of Gloster's eyes, and the protracted foolery between Edgar and his helpless father, but he refused to admit romantic love into this drama of the madness that separates father and child.
Though Shakespeare chose to involve himself in these manifold difficulties of story and structure, he hardly felt his fetters. No play depends less on mere incident and event. The inconsistencies and confusion of the action are forgotten in the wild turmoil of human passions. Wild, terrible, elementary, brutal, grotesque, or sublime,—everything in the play is touched with the imaginative truth that gives it limitless range of suggestion, applicable to any discord of parents and children or to the most dreadful spiritual torture. Insanity, long a favorite theme of Elizabethan tragedy, and fantastic grotesqueness, often its bane, summon his imagination to its most wonderful creation when the feigning Bedlam counters the mad king mid the jests of the fool and the havoc of the storm. Such a conception could have been attempted only in an age which took its emotions strong and mixed, which found insanity a subject for laughter as well as horror, and which refused to limit the imagination by reason or rule. In that age a lesser than Shakespeare might have formed the bare design of making his audience laugh at the fool and poor Tom, and shudder at the eyeless Gloster and the raving Ancient. Something akin to it may be found in many scenes, in that in which Marlowe's emperor and empress dash out their brains against the bars of their cage in a frenzy of humiliation, or that in which Webster's duchess stands undazzled amid the dancing ring of obscene maniacs. The Elizabethan drama had prepared the opportunity for the full and terrible presentation of the discords and agony of a breaking mind. The London audience was ready for the scenes on the heath.