Tragedy

by Ashley Horace Thorndike

CHAPTER VI

SHAKESPEARE

Our study has perhaps already made it evident that Shakespeare's tragedies were in many ways the product of a rapid and complex evolution. At the same time it is clear that, until Shakespeare, Elizabethan tragedy with all its genius and innovations had failed to attain finality of art, or to mark out any sure pathway thither. It was still in its formative period when he created out of it something new and immortal, and its development continued after his death mainly in response to forces not of his initiating. For the past two centuries, to a constantly increasing body of spectators and readers, his tragedies have had a life entirely unconnected with the works of his contemporaries, an existence that has dominated our theatres and our conceptions of tragedy, and become a part of the daily living and the permanent ideals of the race. It is therefore necessary to separate his plays from the mass of tragedies, and to review them for a moment as the creations of a genius that was the chief creator as well as the glory of English tragedy.

Two points of view that have been largely maintained in nineteenth century criticism of Shakespeare may, however, be neglected in our summary. His plays have been viewed as the reflection of his personal experiences and emotions; and his return to tragic themes about 1600 and his occupation with them for the next eight years have been connected with a supposed period of spiritual depression in his own life. Again, the generalization of experience and the abundant wisdom of his tragedies have been viewed as the result of a conscious and rather systematic philosophy of life. Much might be said for these attitudes of criticism. Any attempt to describe the plays in terms of our emotions as readers is likely to result in the attribution of those emotions to the author, an interesting process of analogy and one hardly to be disproved. Any attempt to survey his work as a whole and to relate its parts is likely to result in the systemization of his message and philosophy. But for students of the growth of his dramatic art under the peculiar conditions of the reigns of Elizabeth and James, these nineteenth century points of view involve dangerous critical anachronisms. Shakespeare does not seem to have been a lyric Shelley or Byron, making poetry out of his changing moods, or a Tennyson or Browning generalizing life in the persons of his men and women. There seems no reason for separating him from his companion poets and playwrights. Like them he was in the first place telling a story for the stage; like them he found in these plays opportunity for the expression of his knowledge of human motives in the guise of beautiful verse; and like them, when he chose tragic themes, he became absorbed in the presentation of the tragic facts and problems of life. Our attempt to determine his relations to them is not to discover indebtedness large or minute, but rather by the safest approach to arrive at a right appreciation of his genius and its transcendent contribution to tragedy.

For the purpose of our survey we may have the four great tragedies chiefly in mind. The early tragedies are manifestly the products of an experimental period and the precursors of the latter plays; and the three Roman histories have a subordinate and contributory rather than an essential and preëminent part in his achievement in tragedy. Whatever can be said of the four great tragedies applies in its essentials to all.

All these plays taken together illustrate the extraordinary amalgamation of the medieval and classical inheritances that English tragedy had received as a birthright. No play escapes from its narrative sources, and some are bound closely by them; yet the choice of sources often indicates the influence of the Senecan formula, sensational externals giving opportunity for an introspective analysis of emotional crises, notably in the stories of crime, revenge, and retribution. Their enormous variety of incident, their mingling of the comic and the tragic, their admission of physical horrors, deaths, and spectacles mark the survival of the medieval tradition, while the aphoristic and heightened style, the ghosts and the soliloquies are derivatives from Seneca. The freedom of the medieval stage to the presentation of all sorts of matters accounts in part for their splendid comprehensiveness, while classical theory is partly responsible for their restriction to momentous events and supernormal persons. Their structure remains epic and popular, but progress toward dramatic unity seems conditioned by the Senecan five-act scheme. The medieval idea of the pagan deity Fortune is preserved; and conceptions of good and evil, like those of the morality, stand side by side with classical conceptions of the struggle between the individual and fate. The union of these diverse elements has become too close for disentanglement. "Macbeth," based upon Holinshed's chronicle, comes nearest in conception and treatment to classical tragedy; "Antony and Cleopatra" in structure and method reverts the nearest to medieval models.

More distinct contemporary influences reappear similarly amalgamated and transformed. In "Hamlet" we have a play closely related to those of a particular species; but in the other plays of Shakespeare's maturity nothing like close relationship can be found to the great examples of Marlowe, to the peculiar type introduced by Kyd and developed by Marston, or to the contemporary efforts of Chapman and Jonson. Any one play doubtless responded to a tangle of influences not now to be separated. Current popular plays, practices on the stage, the personalities of the actors, Shakespeare's own preceding plays, contemporary non-dramatic literature, current events such as the Essex rebellion or the Gunpowder Plot, and hosts of other influences were at work directing the development of an old story into a tragedy. Taking the plays as a body, some of the more important of these limiting and directing influences still remain discernible in the transformed result.

All the tragedies but "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet," only partial exceptions, relate the falls of princes and the revolutions of kingdoms. These stories of princes are of the same kind as in other Elizabethan tragedy. In a setting of court and camp they place sensational crimes, and trace the accompaniments and consequences. Their themes are revenge, madness, tyranny, conspiracy, lust, adultery, and jealousy. They abound in villany, intrigue, and slaughter. They avoid Senecan atrocities and the abnormal phases of lust; but the tearing out of Gloster's eyes recalls the horrors of the early plays; while revenge, conspiracy, and villany are as prominent as in the contemporary tragedies of Marston, Jonson, and Chapman. Three of the stories include ghosts, while in "Macbeth" the weird sisters offer an opportunity for a most original treatment of the supernatural. Comedy is always combined with tragedy, and the medieval tradition and the popular taste for an emotional contrast receive artistic vindication in the grotesqueness of "Hamlet" and "Lear." Each plot, like those of Marlowe's plays, centres about a great personality and illustrates a temperament dominated by passion. It traces the course of folly, mistake, or sin to the wages of death as in "Lear," "Othello," and "Antony and Cleopatra"; or it begins with a murder and records its progeny of crime and death as in "Julius Cæsar," "Hamlet," and "Macbeth."

Shakespeare's choice of stories was clearly determined by the Elizabethan conception of tragedy and by the current tastes of the theatre. And by these stories his imagination was directed and limited. However absorbed he became in character or ethics, he never neglected the plot or the theatre. Consequently the great revelation of tragic fact which he gave to posterity was limited by these stories of crime and hampered by their improbabilities and stage effects. The tragedy of ambition is limited to the story of a murderer who sees a ghost; and the tragedy of ingratitude is joined to a relation of senile folly, crime, and the humors of Tom of Bedlam. Even his interpretation of human motives suffers, for the bloodthirstiness of Hamlet and the perverse reticence of Cordelia belong to the old plots as much as to the characters. Yet Shakespeare's greatness of mind no less than his responsiveness to contemporary taste appears in his very choice of material. Whether he took the oft-told tragedies of Cæsar, Brutus, Antony and Cleopatra, or the old plays of Hamlet and Lear, or the neglected themes of Othello and Macbeth, he chose always stories of great dramatic interest and those that presented the range and vicissitudes of human passion. His attraction for each story was evidently in the emotional conflict that made each protagonist a great acting part and also a fascinating study of human motive.

Moreover, in his general treatment of this material there is a uniformity that gives some hint of a Shakespearean definition of tragedy. In each play a man of great attainments is presented as involved in a moral conflict that results in his death. This conflict is two-fold, internal between opposing desires, and external against some persons of the counter-actions. Conflicting forces contend for mastery in the hero's breast, and from their confusion he drives on to action that is disastrous. The unusual powers, the best potentialities, of his nature are opposed and thwarted by the forces of chance and circumstance beyond his control; by the force of evil, whether in his own breast or represented by the crime and intrigue of others; and still further, by a defect or deficiency in his own personality. The force of chance, equivalent to the Greek Fate, plays a part in all tragic story and drama; the power of evil without or within was the counter-force in medieval drama, and was the theme most powerfully dwelt upon by Shakespeare's immediate contemporaries. The fateful power of incompatibility of temperament with conditions of life seems to have been Shakespeare's own conception.