The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy
by A. C. Bradley
Publication Details: Shakespearean Tragedy:
Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan,
1904.
In the following essay from his influential study
of Shakespearean tragedy, Bradley outlines his understanding of the
principal characteristics of the generic form. The critic asserts
that Shakespearean tragedy is neither wholly influenced by the
classical Greek model that depends on the operation of fate nor the
Hegelian model that views tragedy as the product of an external
conflict between antagonistic groups; rather, Shakespeare's tragic
conception is shaped by his tragic heroes' internal struggle and
their external responses to the circumstances around them as they
strive to reconcile their actions with the mystery of human nature,
which exhibits a propensity for the performance of both good and
evil.
The question we are to consider in this lecture
may be stated in a variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the
substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both
from its form and from the differences in point of substance
between one tragedy and another? Or thus: What is the nature of the
tragic aspect of life as represented by Shakespeare? What is the
general fact shown now in this tragedy and now in that? And we are
putting the same question when we ask: What is Shakespeare's tragic
conception, or conception of tragedy?
These expressions, it should be observed, do not
imply that Shakespeare himself ever asked or answered such a
question; that he set himself to reflect on the tragic aspects of
life, that he framed a tragic conception, and still less that, like
Aristotle or Corneille, he had a theory of the kind of poetry
called tragedy. These things are all possible; how far any one of
them is probable we need not discuss; but none of them is
presupposed by the question we are going to consider. This question
implies only that, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare in writing
tragedy did represent a certain aspect of life in a certain way,
and that through examination of his writings we ought to be able,
to some extent, to describe this aspect and way in terms addressed
to the understanding. Such a description, so far as it is true and
adequate, may, after these explanations, be called indifferently an
account of the substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of
Shakespeare's conception of tragedy or view of the tragic
fact.
Two further warnings may be required. In the first
place, we must remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one
aspect. We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of
looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at
Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at
Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.
Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at their best
always look at things in one light; but Hamlet and Henry
IV and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct
positions, and Shakespeare's whole dramatic view is not to be
identified with any one of these reflections. And, in the second
place, I may repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the
most part, we are to be content with his dramatic view, and
are not to ask whether it corresponded exactly with his opinions or
creed outside his poetry--the opinions or creed of the being whom
we sometimes oddly call 'Shakespeare the man.' It does not seem
likely that outside his poetry he was a very simple-minded Catholic
or Protestant or Atheist, as some have maintained; but we cannot be
sure, as with those other poets we can, that in his works he
expressed his deepest and most cherished convictions on ultimate
questions, or even that he had any. And in his dramatic conceptions
there is enough to occupy us.
1
In approaching our subject it will be best,
without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous
theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to
collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy. And
first, to begin from the outside, such a tragedy brings before us a
considerable number of persons (many more than the persons in a
Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are reckoned among
them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person, the
'hero,'1 or at most of two, the 'hero' and 'heroine.'
Moreover, it is only in the love-tragedies, Romeo and Juliet
and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the
centre of the action as the hero. The rest, including
Macbeth, are single stars. So that, having noticed the
peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the sake of
brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
concerned primarily with one person.
The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the
death of the hero. On the one hand (whatever may be true of
tragedy elsewhere), no play at the end of which the hero remains
alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy; and we no
longer class Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline as
such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story
depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes
and leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by
'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It
is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity
conducting to death.
The suffering and calamity are, moreover,
exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person. They are themselves
of some striking kind. They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and
contrasted with previous happiness or glory. A tale, for example,
of a man slowly worn to death by disease, poverty, little cares,
sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous or dreadful it
might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean
sense.
Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then,
affecting the hero, and--we must now add--generally extending far
and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe,
are an essential ingredient in tragedy and a chief source of the
tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the proportions of
this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will
naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example, has a much larger part
in King Lear than in Macbeth, and is directed in the
one case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor
characters.
Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have
so far reached. They would more than suffice to describe the whole
tragic fact as it presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the
mediaeval mind a tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play, and
its notion of the matter of this narrative may readily be gathered
from Dante or, still better, from Chaucer. Chaucer's Monk's
Tale is a series of what he calls 'tragedies'; and this means
in fact a series of tales de Casibus Illustrium
Virorum,--stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as
Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And the Monk ends the
tale of Croesus thus:
Anhanged was Cresus, the proudè kyng;
His roial tronè myghte hym nat availle.
Tragédie is noon oother maner thyng,
Ne kan in syngyng criè ne biwaille
But for that Fortune alwey wole assaile
With unwar strook the regnès that been
proude;
For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she
faille,
And covere hire brighte facè with a
clowde.
A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a
man who 'stood in high degree,' happy and apparently secure,--such
was the tragic fact to the mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to
common human sympathy and pity; it startled also another feeling,
that of fear. It frightened men and awed them. It made them feel
that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable
power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name,--a power
which appears to smile on him for a little, and then on a sudden
strikes him down in his pride.
Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger
than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is
worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point
which is often ignored. Tragedy with Shakespeare is concerned
always with persons of 'high degree'; often with kings or princes;
if not, with leaders in the state like Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony;
at the least, as in Romeo and Juliet, with members of great
houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a decided
difference here between Othello and our three other
tragedies, but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is
no mere private person; he is the General of the Republic. At the
beginning we see him in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The
consciousness of his high position never leaves him. At the end,
when he is determined to live no longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet
not to be misjudged by the great world, and his last speech
begins,
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know
it.2
And this characteristic of Shakespeare's
tragedies, though not the most vital, is neither external nor
unimportant. The saying that every death-bed is the scene of the
fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning, but it would not be true if
the word 'tragedy' bore its dramatic sense. The pangs of despised
love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant
and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be so when the
prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the triumvir,
or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His fate
affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls
suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall
produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of
the omnipotence--perhaps the caprice--of Fortune or Fate, which no
tale of private life can possibly rival.
Such feelings are constantly evoked by
Shakespeare's tragedies,--again in varying degrees. Perhaps they
are the very strongest of the emotions awakened by the early
tragedy of Richard II, where they receive a concentrated
expression in Richard's famous speech about the antic Death, who
sits in the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a
king,
grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and
his fancied security have wholly encased him round, and then coming
and boring with a little pin through his castle wall. And these
feelings, though their predominance is subdued in the mightiest
tragedies, remain powerful there. In the figure of the maddened
Lear we see
A sight most pitiful in the meanest
wretch,
Past speaking of in a king;
and if we would realise the truth in this matter
we cannot do better than compare with the effect of King
Lear the effect of Tourgénief's parallel and remarkable tale of
peasant life, A King Lear of the Steppes.
2
A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may
be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a
man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we
have now to regard it from another side. No amount of calamity
which merely befell a man, descending from the clouds like
lightning, or stealing from the darkness like pestilence, could
alone provide the substance of its story. Job was the greatest of
all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh
more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him
to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it
become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great
wind from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were
conceived as sent by a supernatural power, whether just or
malignant. The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are
they sent; they proceed mainly from actions, and those the actions
of men.
We see a number of human beings placed in certain
circumstances; and we see, arising from the co-operation of their
characters in these circumstances, certain actions. These actions
beget others, and these others beget others again, until this
series of inter-connected deeds leads by an apparently inevitable
sequence to a catastrophe. The effect of such a series on
imagination is to make us regard the sufferings which accompany it,
and the catastrophe in which it ends, not only or chiefly as
something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally as
something which is caused by them. This at least may be said of the
principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always
contributes in some measure to the disaster in which he
perishes.
This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs
greatly from the first. Men, from this point of view, appear to us
primarily as agents, 'themselves the authors of their proper woe';
and our fear and pity, though they will not cease or diminish, will
be modified accordingly. We are now to consider this second aspect,
remembering that it too is only one aspect, and additional to the
first, not a substitute for it.
The 'story' or 'action' of a Shakespearean tragedy
does not consist, of course, solely of human actions or deeds; but
the deeds are the predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the
most part, actions in the full sense of the word; not things done
''tween asleep and wake,' but acts or omissions thoroughly
expressive of the doer,--characteristic deeds. The centre of the
tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action
issuing from character, or in character issuing in
action.
Shakespeare's main interest lay here. To say that
it lay in mere character, or was a psychological interest,
would be a great mistake, for he was dramatic to the tips of his
fingers. It is possible to find places where he has given a certain
indulgence to his love of poetry, and even to his turn for general
reflections; but it would be very difficult, and in his later
tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect passages where he has
allowed such freedom to the interest in character apart from
action. But for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of mere
'plot' (which is a very different thing from the tragic 'action'),
for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like The
Woman in White, it is clear that he cared even less. I do not
mean that this interest is absent from his dramas; but it is
subordinate to others, and is so interwoven with them that we are
rarely conscious of it apart, and rarely feel in any great strength
the half-intellectual, half-nervous excitement of following an
ingenious complication. What we do feel strongly, as a tragedy
advances to its close, is that the calamities and catastrophe
follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main source
of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare,
'character is destiny' is no doubt an exaggeration, and one that
may mislead (for many of his tragic personages, if they had not met
with peculiar circumstances, would have escaped a tragic end, and
might even have lived fairly untroubled lives); but it is the
exaggeration of a vital truth.
This truth, with some of its qualifications, will
appear more clearly if we now go on to ask what elements are to be
found in the 'story' or 'action,' occasionally or frequently,
beside the characteristic deeds, and the sufferings and
circumstances, of the persons. I will refer to three of these
additional factors.
(a) Shakespeare, occasionally and for
reasons which need not be discussed here, represents abnormal
conditions of mind; insanity, for example, somnambulism,
hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are certainly not what
we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds expressive of
character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never introduced
as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth's
sleepwalking has no influence whatever on the events that follow
it. Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the
air: he saw the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan.
Lear's insanity is not the cause of a tragic conflict any more than
Ophelia's; it is, like Ophelia's, the result of a conflict; and in
both cases the effect is mainly pathetic. If Lear were really mad
when he divided his kingdom, if Hamlet were really mad at any time
in the story, they would cease to be tragic characters.
(b) Shakespeare also introduces the
supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and
witches who have supernatural knowledge. This supernatural element
certainly cannot in most cases, if in any, be explained away as an
illusion in the mind of one of the characters. And further, it does
contribute to the action, and is in more than one instance an
indispensable part of it: so that to describe human character, with
circumstances, as always the sole motive force in this
action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always
placed in the closest relation with character. It gives a
confirmation and a distinct form to inward movements already
present and exerting an influence; to the sense of failure in
Brutus, to the stifled workings of conscience in Richard, to the
half-formed thought or the horrified memory of guilt in Macbeth, to
suspicion in Hamlet. Moreover, its influence is never of a
compulsive kind. It forms no more than an element, however
important, in the problem which the hero has to face; and we are
never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or
responsibility for dealing with this problem. So far indeed are we
from feeling this, that many readers run to the opposite extreme,
and openly or privately regard the supernatural as having nothing
to do with the real interest of the play.
(c) Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his
tragedies allows to 'chance' or 'accident' an appreciable influence
at some point in the action. Chance or accident here will be found,
I think, to mean any occurrence (not supernatural, of course) which
enters the dramatic sequence neither from the agency of a
character, nor from the obvious surrounding
circumstances.3 It may be called an accident, in this
sense, that Romeo never got the Friar's message about the potion,
and that Juliet did not awake from her long sleep a minute sooner;
an accident that Edgar arrived at the prison just too late to save
Cordelia's life; an accident that Desdemona dropped her
handkerchief at the most fatal of moments; an accident that the
pirate ship attacked Hamlet's ship, so that he was able to return
forthwith to Denmark. Now this operation of accident is a fact, and
a prominent fact, of human life. To exclude it wholly from
tragedy, therefore, would be, we may say, to fail in truth. And,
besides, it is not merely a fact. That men may start a course of
events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a tragic
fact. The dramatist may use accident so as to make us feel this;
and there are also other dramatic uses to which it may be put.
Shakespeare accordingly admits it. On the other hand, any
large admission of chance into the tragic
sequence4 would certainly weaken, and might destroy, the
sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and catastrophe.
And Shakespeare really uses it very sparingly. We seldom find
ourselves exclaiming, 'What an unlucky accident!' I believe most
readers would have to search painfully for instances. It is,
further, frequently easy to see the dramatic intention of an
accident; and some things which look like accidents have really a
connection with character, and are therefore not in the full sense
accidents. Finally, I believe it will be found that almost all the
prominent accidents occur when the action is well advanced and the
impression of the causal sequence is too firmly fixed to be
impaired.
Thus it appears that these three elements in the
'action' are subordinate, while the dominant factor consists in
deeds which issue from character. So that, by way of summary, we
may now alter our first statement, 'A tragedy is a story of
exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate,'
and we may say instead (what in its turn is one-sided, though less
so), that the story is one of human actions producing exceptional
calamity and ending in the death of such a
man.5
***
Before we leave the 'action,' however, there is
another question that may usefully be asked. Can we define this
'action' further by describing it as a conflict?
The frequent use of this idea in discussions on
tragedy is ultimately due, I suppose, to the influence of Hegel's
theory on the subject, certainly the most important theory since
Aristotle's. But Hegel's view of the tragic conflict is not only
unfamiliar to English readers and difficult to expound shortly, but
it had its origin in reflections on Greek tragedy and, as Hegel was
well aware, applies only imperfectly to the works of
Shakespeare.6 I shall, therefore, confine myself to the
idea of conflict in its more general form. In this form it is
obviously applicable to Shakespeare tragedy; but it is vague, and I
will try to make it more precise by putting the question, Who are
the combatants in this conflict?
Not seldom the conflict may quite naturally be
conceived as lying between two persons, of whom the hero is one;
or, more fully, as lying between two parties or groups, in one of
which the hero is the leading figure. Or if we prefer to speak (as
we may quite well do if we know what we are about) of the passions,
tendencies, ideas, principles, forces, which animate these persons
or groups, we may say that two of such passions or ideas, regarded
as animating two persons or groups, are the combatants. The love of
Romeo and Juliet is in conflict with the hatred of their houses,
represented by various other characters. The cause of Brutus and
Cassius struggles with that of Julius, Octavius and Antony. In
Richard II the King stands on one side, Bolingbroke and his
party on the other. In Macbeth the hero and heroine are
opposed to the representatives of Duncan. In all these cases the
great majority of the dramatis personae fall without
difficulty into antagonistic groups, and the conflict between these
groups ends with the defeat of the hero.
Yet one cannot help feeling that in at least one
of these cases, Macbeth, there is something a little
external in this way of looking at the action. And when we come to
some other plays this feeling increases. No doubt most of the
characters in Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, or Antony and
Cleopatra can be arranged in opposed groups;7 and no
doubt there is a conflict; and yet it seems misleading to describe
this conflict as one between these groups. It cannot be
simply this. For though Hamlet and the King are mortal foes, yet
that which engrosses our interest and dwells in our memory at least
as much as the conflict between them, is the conflict within
one of them. And so it is, though not in the same degree, with
Antony and Cleopatra and even with Othello; and, in
fact, in a certain measure, it is so with nearly all the tragedies.
There is an outward conflict of persons and groups, there is also a
conflict of forces in the hero's soul; and even in Julius
Caesar and Macbeth the interest of the former can hardly
be said to exceed that of the latter.
The truth is, that the type of tragedy in which
the hero opposes to a hostile force an undivided soul, is not the
Shakespearean type. The souls of those who contend with the hero
may be thus undivided; they generally are; but, as a rule, the
hero, though he pursues his fated way, is, at least at some point
in the action, and sometimes at many, torn by an inward struggle;
and it is frequently at such points that Shakespeare shows his most
extraordinary power. If further we compare the earlier tragedies
with the later, we find that it is in the latter, the maturest
works, that this inward struggle is most emphasised. In the last of
them, Coriolanus, its interest completely eclipses towards
the close of the play that of the outward conflict. Romeo and
Juliet, Richard III, Richard II, where the hero contends with
an outward force, but comparatively little with himself, are all
early plays.
If we are to include the outer and the inner
struggle in a conception more definite than that of conflict in
general, we must employ some such phrase as 'spiritual force.' This
will mean whatever forces act in the human spirit, whether good or
evil, whether personal passion or impersonal principle; doubts,
desires, scruples, ideas--whatever can animate, shake, possess, and
drive a man's soul. In a Shakespearean tragedy some such forces are
shown in conflict. They are shown acting in men and generating
strife between them. They are also shown, less universally, but
quite as characteristically, generating disturbance and even
conflict in the soul of the hero. Treasonous ambition in Macbeth
collides with loyalty and patriotism in Macduff and Malcolm: here
is the outward conflict. But these powers or principles equally
collide in the soul of Macbeth himself: here is the inner. And
neither by itself could make the tragedy.8
We shall see later the importance of this idea.
Here we need only observe that the notion of tragedy as a conflict
emphasises the fact that action is the centre of the story, while
the concentration of interest, in the greater plays, on the inward
struggle emphasises the fact that this action is essentially the
expression of character.
3
Let us turn now from the 'action' to the central
figure in it; and, ignoring the characteristics which distinguish
the heroes from one another, let us ask whether they have any
common qualities which appear to be essential to the tragic
effect.
One they certainly have. They are exceptional
beings. We have seen already that the hero, with Shakespeare, is a
person of high degree or of public importance, and that his actions
or sufferings are of an unusual kind. But this is not all. His
nature also is exceptional, and generally raises him in some
respect much above the average level of humanity. This does not
mean that he is an eccentric or a paragon. Shakespeare never drew
monstrosities of virtue; some of his heroes are far from being
'good'; and if he drew eccentrics he gave them a subordinate
position in the plot. His tragic characters are made of the stuff
we find within ourselves and within the persons who surround them.
But, by an intensification of the life which they share with
others, they are raised above them; and the greatest are raised so
far that, if we fully realise all that is implied in their words
and actions, we become conscious that in real life we have known
scarcely any one resembling them. Some, like Hamlet and Cleopatra,
have genius. Others, like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are
built on the grand scale; and desire, passion, or will attains in
them a terrible force. In almost all we observe a marked
one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a
total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force
which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the
whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind.
This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic
trait. It is present in his early heroes, Romeo and Richard II,
infatuated men, who otherwise rise comparatively little above the
ordinary level. It is a fatal gift, but it carries with it a touch
of greatness; and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or
genius, or immense force, we realise the full power and reach of
the soul, and the conflict in which it engages acquires that
magnitude which stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration,
terror, and awe.
The easiest way to bring home to oneself the
nature of the tragic character is to compare it with a character of
another kind. Dramas like Cymbeline and the Winter's
Tale, which might seem destined to end tragically, but actually
end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely to the fact that the
principal characters fail to reach tragic dimensions. And,
conversely, if these persons were put in the place of the tragic
heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be
tragedies. Posthumus would never have acted as Othello did;
Othello, on his side, would have met Iachimo's challenge with
something more than words. If, like Posthumus, he had remained
convinced of his wife's infidelity, he would not have repented her
execution; if, like Leontes, he had come to believe that by an
unjust accusation he had caused her death, he would never have
lived on, like Leontes. In the same way the villain Iachimo has no
touch of tragic greatness. But Iago comes nearer to it, and if Iago
had slandered Imogen and had supposed his slanders to have led to
her death, he certainly would not have turned melancholy and wished
to die. One reason why the end of the Merchant of Venice
fails to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that
we cannot believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions
imposed on him. This was a case where Shakespeare's imagination ran
away with him, so that he drew a figure with which the destined
pleasant ending would not harmonise.
In the circumstances where we see the hero placed,
his tragic trait, which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To
meet these circumstances something is required which a smaller man
might have given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by
action or omission; and his error, joining with other causes,
brings on him ruin. This is always so with Shakespeare. As we have
seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and
solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is
the idea of the hero as contributing to his destruction only by
acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal imperfection or error,
which is never absent, is of different kinds and degrees. At one
extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo, which
scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the
murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error
involves no conscious breach of right; in some (e.g. that of
Brutus or Othello) it is accompanied by a full conviction of right.
In Hamlet there is a painful consciousness that duty is being
neglected; in Antony a clear knowledge that the worse of two
courses is being pursued; but Richard and Macbeth are the only
heroes who do what they themselves recognise to be villainous. It
is important to observe that Shakespeare does admit such
heroes,9 and also that he appears to feel, and exerts
himself to meet, the difficulty that arises from their admission.
The difficulty is that the spectator must desire their defeat and
even their destruction; and yet this desire, and the satisfaction
of it, are not tragic feelings. Shakespeare gives to Richard
therefore a power which excites astonishment, and a courage which
extorts admiration. He gives to Macbeth a similar, though less
extraordinary, greatness, and adds to it a conscience so terrifying
in its warnings and so maddening in its reproaches that the
spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified sympathy and awe
which balance, at the least, the desire for the hero's
ruin.
The tragic hero with Shakespeare, then, need not
be 'good,' though generally he is 'good' and therefore at once wins
sympathy in his error. But it is necessary that he should have so
much of greatness that in his error and fall we may be vividly
conscious of the possibilities of human nature.10 Hence,
in the first place, a Shakespearean tragedy is never, like some
miscalled tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book with
the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched
and he may be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be
heart-rending and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. The most
confirmed of cynics ceases to be a cynic while he reads these
plays. And with this greatness of the tragic hero (which is not
always confined to him) is connected, secondly, what I venture to
describe as the centre of the tragic impression. This central
feeling is the impression of waste. With Shakespeare, at any rate,
the pity and fear which are stirred by the tragic story seem to
unite with, and even to merge in, a profound sense of sadness and
mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. 'What a piece of
work is man,' we cry; 'so much more beautiful and so much more
terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if this beauty and
greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?' We seem to
have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic
fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere,
from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see
power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to
call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing,
devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with
dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end.
Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery, because that greatness
of soul which it exhibits oppressed, conflicting and destroyed, is
the highest existence in our view. It forces the mystery upon us,
and it makes us realise so vividly the worth of that which is
wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the reflection that
all is vanity.
4
In this tragic world, then, where individuals,
however great they may be and however decisive their actions may
appear, are so evidently not the ultimate power, what is this
power? What account can we give of it which will correspond with
the imaginative impressions we receive? This will be our final
question.
The variety of the answers given to this question
shows how difficult it is. And the difficulty has many sources.
Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come
into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and
exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact. Some are so much
influenced by their own habitual beliefs that they import them more
or less into their interpretation of every author who is
'sympathetic' to them. And even where neither of these causes of
error appears to operate, another is present from which it is
probably impossible wholly to escape. What I mean is this. Any
answer we give to the question proposed ought to correspond with,
or to represent in terms of the understanding, our imaginative and
emotional experience in reading the tragedies. We have, of course,
to do our best by study and effort to make this experience true to
Shakespeare; but, that done to the best of our ability, the
experience is the matter to be interpreted, and the test by which
the interpretation must be tried. But it is extremely hard to make
out exactly what this experience is, because, in the very effort to
make it out, our reflecting mind, full of everyday ideas, is always
tending to transform it by the application of these ideas, and so
to elicit a result which, instead of representing the fact,
conventionalises it. And the consequence is not only mistaken
theories; it is that many a man will declare that he feels in
reading a tragedy what he never really felt, while he fails to
recognise what he actually did feel. It is not likely that we shall
escape all these dangers in our effort to find an answer to the
question regarding the tragic world and the ultimate power in
it.
It will be agreed, however, first, that this
question must not be answered in 'religious' language. For although
this or that dramatis persona may speak of gods or of God,
of evil spirits or of Satan, of heaven and of hell, and although
the poet may show us ghosts from another world, these ideas do not
materially influence his representation of life, nor are they used
to throw light on the mystery of its tragedy. The Elizabethan drama
was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing he
practically confined his view to the world of non-theological
observation and thought, so that he represents it substantially in
one and the same way whether the period of the story is
pre-Christian or Christian.11 He looked at this
'secular' world most intently and seriously; and he painted it, we
cannot but conclude, with entire fidelity, without the wish to
enforce an opinion of his own, and, in essentials, without regard
to anyone's hopes, fears, or beliefs. His greatness is largely due
to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary power; and if, as a
private person, he had a religious faith, his tragic view can
hardly have been in contradiction with this faith, but must have
been included in it, and supplemented, not abolished, by additional
ideas.
Two statements, next, may at once be made
regarding the tragic fact as he represents it: one, that it is and
remains to us something piteous, fearful and mysterious; the other,
that the representation of it does not leave us crushed, rebellious
or desperate. These statements will be accepted, I believe, by any
reader who is in touch with Shakespeare's mind and can observe his
own. Indeed such a reader is rather likely to complain that they
are painfully obvious. But if they are true as well as obvious,
something follows from them in regard to our present
question.
From the first it follows that the ultimate power
in the tragic world is not adequately described as a law or order
which we can see to be just and benevolent,--as, in that sense, a
'moral order': for in that case the spectacle of suffering and
waste could not seem to us so fearful and mysterious as it does.
And from the second it follows that this ultimate power is not
adequately described as a fate, whether malicious and cruel, or
blind and indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in that
case the spectacle would leave us desperate or rebellious. Yet one
or other of these two ideas will be found to govern most accounts
of Shakespeare's tragic view or world. These accounts isolate and
exaggerate single aspects, either the aspect of action or that of
suffering; either the close and unbroken connection of character,
will, deed and catastrophe, which, taken alone, shows the
individual simply as sinning against, or failing to conform to, the
moral order and drawing his just doom on his own head; or else that
pressure of outward forces, that sway of accident, and those blind
and agonised struggles, which, taken alone, show him as the mere
victim of some power which cares neither for his sins nor for his
pain. Such views contradict one another, and no third view can
unite them; but the several aspects from whose isolation and
exaggeration they spring are both present in the fact, and a view
which would be true to the fact and to the whole of our imaginative
experience must in some way combine these aspects.
Let us begin, then, with the idea of fatality and
glance at some of the impressions which give rise to it, without
asking at present whether this idea is their natural or fitting
expression. There can be no doubt that they do arise and that they
ought to arise. If we do not feel at times that the hero is, in
some sense, a doomed man; that he and others drift struggling to
destruction like helpless creatures borne on an irresistible flood
towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be, their fault is far
from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they suffer; and
that the power from which they cannot escape is relentless and
immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of the full
tragic effect.
The sources of these impressions are various, and
I will refer only to a few. One of them is put into words by
Shakespeare himself when he makes the player-king in Hamlet
say:
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our
own;
'their ends' are the issues or outcomes of our
thoughts, and these, says the speaker, are not our own. The tragic
world is a world of action, and action is the translation of
thought into reality. We see men and women confidently attempting
it. They strike into the existing order of things in pursuance of
their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they intended; it is
terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to ourselves,
of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the dark,
and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of
a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action
binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they
meant well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he
contrives misery for his country and death for himself. No one
could mean worse than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he
spins for others. Hamlet, recoiling from the rough duty of revenge,
is pushed into blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at
last on the revenge he could not will. His adversary's murders, and
no less his adversary's remorse, bring about the opposite of what
they sought. Lear follows an old man's whim, half generous, half
selfish; and in a moment it looses all the powers of darkness upon
him. Othello agonises over an empty fiction, and, meaning to
execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and strangles love. They
understand themselves no better than the world about them.
Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like snow
before a fire. Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own
child's brains, finds herself hounded to death by the smell of a
stranger's blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would
jump the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all
the horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man's
thought, translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of
itself. His act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment
of time, becomes a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom.
And whatsoever he dreams of doing, he achieves that which he least
dreamed of, his own destruction.
All this makes us feel the blindness and
helplessness of man. Yet by itself it would hardly suggest the idea
of fate, because it shows man as in some degree, however slight,
the cause of his own undoing. But other impressions come to aid it.
It is aided by everything which makes us feel that a man is, as we
say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is, even in Shakespeare,
not a little. Here come in some of the accidents already
considered, Juliet's waking from her trance a minute too late,
Desdemona's loss of her handkerchief at the only moment when the
loss would have mattered, that insignificant delay which cost
Cordelia's life. Again, men act, no doubt, in accordance with their
characters; but what is it that brings them just the one problem
which is fatal to them and would be easy to another, and sometimes
brings it to them just when they are least fitted to face it? How
is it that Othello comes to be the companion of the one man in the
world who is at once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough to
ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it happen that Lear has
such daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even character itself
contributes to these feelings of fatality. How could men escape, we
cry, such vehement propensities as drive Romeo, Antony, Coriolanus,
to their doom? And why is it that a man's virtues help to destroy
him, and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with
everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly separate
them even in imagination?
If we find in Shakespeare's tragedies the source
of impressions like these, it is important, on the other hand, to
notice what we do not find there. We find practically no
trace of fatalism in its more primitive, crude and obvious forms.
Nothing, again, makes us think of the actions and sufferings of the
persons as somehow arbitrarily fixed beforehand without regard to
their feelings, thoughts and resolutions. Nor, I believe, are the
facts ever so presented that it seems to us as if the supreme
power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a family or
an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression
(which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a
family, owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is
doomed in later days to continue a career of portentous calamities
and sins. Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much
interest in what we now call heredity, or to have attached much
importance to it.
What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions
already considered lead us to describe as the ultimate power in the
tragic world? It appears to be a mythological expression for the
whole system or order, of which the individual characters form an
inconsiderable and feeble part; which seems to determine, far more
than they, their native dispositions and their circumstances, and,
through these, their action; which is so vast and complex that they
can scarcely at all understand it or control its workings; and
which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever changes take
place in it produce other changes inevitably and without regard to
men's desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is best
called by the name of fate or no,12 it can hardly be
denied that it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic
world, and that it has such characteristics as these. But the name
'fate' may be intended to imply something more--to imply that this
order is a blank necessity, totally regardless alike of human weal
and of the difference between good and evil or right and wrong. And
such an implication many readers would at once reject. They would
maintain, on the contrary, that this order shows characteristics of
quite another kind from those which made us give it the name of
fate, characteristics which certainly should not induce us to
forget those others, but which would lead us to describe it as a
moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity.
5
Let us turn, then, to this idea. It brings into
the light those aspects of the tragic fact which the idea of fate
throws into the shade. And the argument which leads to it in its
simplest form may be stated briefly thus: 'Whatever may be said of
accidents, circumstances and the like, human action is, after all,
presented to us as the central fact in tragedy, and also as the
main cause of the catastrophe. That necessity which so much
impresses us is, after all, chiefly the necessary connection of
actions and consequences. For these actions we, without even
raising a question on the subject, hold the agents responsible; and
the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The critical
action is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe
is, in the main, the return of this action on the head of the
agent. It is an example of justice; and that order which, present
alike within the agents and outside them, infallibly brings it
about, is therefore just. The rigour of its justice is terrible, no
doubt, for a tragedy is a terrible story; but, in spite of fear and
pity, we acquiesce, because our sense of justice is
satisfied.'
Now, if this view is to hold good, the 'justice'
of which it speaks must be at once distinguished from what is
called 'poetic justice.' 'Poetic justice' means that prosperity and
adversity are distributed in proportion to the merits of the
agents. Such 'poetic justice' is in flagrant contradiction with the
facts of life, and it is absent from Shakespeare's tragic picture
of life; indeed, this very absence is a ground of constant
complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson. Δρaσαντi παtειν, 'the doer
must suffer'--this we find in Shakespeare. We also find that
villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at the last. But
an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an assignment
even of life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not find. No
one who thinks of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that one
end awaits Richard III and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks
himself which suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse
Shakespeare of representing the ultimate power as 'poetically'
just.
And we must go further. I venture to say that it
is a mistake to use at all these terms of justice and merit or
desert. And this for two reasons. In the first place, essential as
it is to recognise the connection between act and consequence, and
natural as it may seem in some cases (e.g. Macbeth's) to say
that the doer only gets what he deserves, yet in very many cases to
say this would be quite unnatural. We might not object to the
statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness
and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did
suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy
moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact that the
consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would appear
to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we
call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the
word in some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond
what is shown us of this order, and are appealing to
faith.
But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and
desert are, it seems to me, in all cases--even those of
Richard III and of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth--untrue to our
imaginative experience. When we are immersed in a tragedy, we feel
towards dispositions, actions, and persons such emotions as
attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror, perhaps
hatred; but we do not judge. This is a point of view which
emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or
the dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking
about the play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and
moral notions. But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion
belongs, to the sphere of these notions; neither does the
imaginative attitude in presence of it. While we are in its world
we watch what is, seeing that so it happened and must have
happened, feeling that it is piteous, dreadful, awful, mysterious,
but neither passing sentence on the agents, nor asking whether the
behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is just. And,
therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the
least, full of danger.13
Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the
ultimate power in the tragic world is a moral order. Let us put
aside the ideas of justice and merit, and speak simply of good and
evil. Let us understand by these words, primarily, moral good and
evil, but also everything else in human beings which we take to be
excellent or the reverse. Let us understand the statement that the
ultimate power or order is 'moral' to mean that it does not show
itself indifferent to good and evil, or equally favourable or
unfavourable to both, but shows itself akin to good and alien from
evil. And, understanding the statement thus, let us ask what
grounds it has in the tragic fact as presented by
Shakespeare.
Here, as in dealing with the grounds on which the
idea of fate rests, I choose only two or three out of many. And the
most important is this. In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of
the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good:
good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic
implication with its opposite in one and the same character. The
main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and, what is
more (though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in
almost every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection
but plain moral evil. The love of Romeo and Juliet conducts them to
death only because of the senseless hatred of their houses. Guilty
ambition, seconded by diabolic malice and issuing in murder, opens
the action in Macbeth. Iago is the main source of the
convulsion in Othello; Goneril, Regan and Edmund in King
Lear. Even when this plain moral evil is not the obviously
prime source within the play, it lies behind it: the situation with
which Hamlet has to deal has been formed by adultery and murder.
Julius Caesar is the only tragedy in which one is even
tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is
obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of
the world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent
between evil and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by
poison is friendly to it or indifferent to the distinction between
poison and food.
Again, if we confine our attention to the hero,
and to those cases where the gross and palpable evil is not in him
but elsewhere, we find that the comparatively innocent hero still
shows some marked imperfection or defect,--irresolution,
precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive simplicity, excessive
susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like. These defects or
imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the word, evil,
and they contribute decisively to the conflict and catastrophe. And
the inference is again obvious. The ultimate power which shows
itself disturbed by this evil and reacts against it, must have a
nature alien to it. Indeed its reaction is so vehement and
'relentless' that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good
in perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.
To this must be added another fact, or another
aspect of the same fact. Evil exhibits itself everywhere as
something negative, barren, weakening, destructive, a principle of
death. It isolates, disunites, and tends to annihilate not only its
opposite but itself. That which keeps the evil man14
prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him to exist, is the
good in him (I do not mean only the obviously 'moral' good). When
the evil in him masters the good and has its way, it destroys other
people through him, but it also destroys him. At the close
of the struggle he has vanished, and has left behind him nothing
that can stand. What remains is a family, a city, a country,
exhausted, pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good
which animates it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have
not the brilliance or greatness of the tragic character, still have
won our respect and confidence. And the inference would seem clear.
If existence in an order depends on good, and if the presence of
evil is hostile to such existence, the inner being or soul of this
order must be of one nature with good.
These are aspects of the tragic world at least as
clearly marked as those which, taken alone, suggest the idea of
fate. And the idea which they in their turn, when taken alone, may
suggest, is that of an order which does not indeed award 'poetic
justice,' but which reacts through the necessity of its own 'moral'
nature both against attacks made upon it and against failure to
conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the exhibition of that
convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle does not leave
us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less distinct
perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from
collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power,
a power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters
themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of
acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass
judgment on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and
the sense of waste, which their struggle, suffering and fall evoke.
And, finally, this view seems quite able to do justice to those
aspects of the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate.
They would appear as various expressions of the fact that the moral
order acts not capriciously or like a human being, but from the
necessity of its nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general
laws,--a necessity or law which of course knows no exception and is
as 'ruthless' as fate.
It is impossible to deny to this view a large
measure of truth. And yet without some amendment it can hardly
satisfy. For it does not include the whole of the facts, and
therefore does not wholly correspond with the impressions they
produce. Let it be granted that the system or order which shows
itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense explained,
moral. Still--at any rate for the eye of sight--the evil against
which it asserts itself, and the persons whom this evil inhabits,
are not really something outside the order, so that they can attack
it or fail to conform to it; they are within it and a part of it.
It itself produces them,--produces Iago as well as Desdemona,
Iago's cruelty as well as Iago's courage. It is not poisoned, it
poisons itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the
poison is poison, and that its health lies in good. But one
significant fact cannot remove another, and the spectacle we
witness scarcely warrants the assertion that the order is
responsible for the good in Desdemona, but Iago for the evil in
Iago. If we make this assertion we make it on grounds other than
the facts as presented in Shakespeare's tragedies.
Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting
itself against attack or want of conformity answer in full to our
feelings regarding the tragic character. We do not think of Hamlet
merely as failing to meet its demand, of Antony as merely sinning
against it, or even of Macbeth as simply attacking it. What we feel
corresponds quite as much to the idea that they are its
parts, expressions, products; that in their defect or evil
it is untrue to its soul of goodness, and falls into
conflict and collision with itself; that, in making them suffer and
waste themselves, it suffers and wastes itself; and that
when, to save its life and regain peace from this intestinal
struggle, it casts them out, it has lost a part of its own
substance,--a part more dangerous and unquiet, but far more
valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which remains,--a
Fortinbras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in its
expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of
good.
Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two
sides or aspects which we can neither separate nor reconcile. The
whole or order against which the individual part shows itself
powerless seems to be animated by a passion for perfection: we
cannot otherwise explain its behaviour towards evil. Yet it appears
to engender this evil within itself, and in its effort to overcome
and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven to mutilate its
own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless good. That
this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank fate, is
no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we
expect it to be such a solution? Shakespeare was not attempting to
justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine
Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if
it were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said even to point
distinctly, like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where a
solution might lie. We find a few references to gods or God, to the
influence of the stars, to another life: some of them certainly,
all of them perhaps, merely dramatic--appropriate to the person
from whose lips they fall. A ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a
secret out of the reach of its hearer--who presently meditates on
the question whether the sleep of death is dreamless. Accidents
once or twice remind us strangely of the words, 'There's a divinity
that shapes our ends.' More important are other impressions.
Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a conviction seems
borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this agony counts as
nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it and thrill
our hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these mighty or
heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space in
which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into
freedom. Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a
presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, that all the
fury of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the
truth, even an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made of.' But
these faint and scattered intimations that the tragic world, being
but a fragment of a whole beyond our vision, must needs be a
contradiction and no ultimate truth, avail nothing to interpret the
mystery. We remain confronted with the inexplicable fact, or the no
less inexplicable appearance, of a world travailing for perfection,
but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, an evil which
it is able to overcome only by self-torture and self-waste. And
this fact or appearance is tragedy.15
Notes
1. Julius Caesar is not an exception to
this rule. But for the name given to the play, presumably to
attract the public, no careful reader would hesitate to call Brutus
the hero.
2. Timon of Athens, we have seen, was
probably not designed by Shakespeare, but even Timon is no
exception to the rule. The sub-plot is concerned with Alcibiades
and his army, and Timon himself is treated by the Senate as a man
of great importance. Arden of Feversham and A Yorkshire
Tragedy would certainly be exceptions to the rule; but I assume
that neither of them is Shakespeare's; and if either is, it belongs
to a different species from his admitted tragedies. See, on this
species, [John Addington] Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors
[in the English Drama, 1884], ch. xi.
3. Even a deed would, I think, be counted an
'accident,' if it were the deed of a very minor person whose
character had not been indicated; because such a deed would not
issue from the little world to which the dramatist had confined our
attention.
4. Comedy stands in a different position. The
tricks played by chance often form a principal part of the comic
action.
5. It may be observed that the influence of the
three elements just considered is to strengthen the tendency,
produced by the sufferings considered first, to regard the tragic
persons as passive rather than as agents.
6. An account of Hegel's view may be found in the
Hibbert Journal for July, 1904.
7. The reader, however, will find considerable
difficulty in placing some very important characters in these and
other plays. I will give only two or three illustrations. Edgar is
clearly not on the same side as Edmund, and yet it seems awkward to
range him on Gloster's side when Gloster wishes to put him to
death. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet, but how can she be said to
be of Hamlet's party against the King and Polonius, or of their
party against Hamlet? Desdemona worships Othello, yet it sounds odd
to say that Othello is on the same side with a person whom he
insults, strikes and murders.
8. I have given names to the 'spiritual forces' in
Macbeth merely to illustrate the idea, and without any
pretension to adequacy. Perhaps, in view of some interpretations of
Shakespeare's plays, it will be as well to add that I do not dream
of suggesting that in any of his dramas Shakespeare imagined two
abstract principles or passions conflicting, and incorporated them
in persons; or that there is any necessity for a reader to define
for himself the particular forces which conflict in a given
case.
9. Aristotle apparently would exclude
them.
10. Richard II is perhaps an exception, and I must
confess that to me he is scarcely a tragic character, and that, if
he is nevertheless a tragic figure, he is so only because his fall
from prosperity to adversity is so great.
11. I say substantially; but the concluding
remarks on Hamlet will modify a little the statements
above.
12. I have raised no objection to the use of the
idea of fate, because it occurs so often both in conversation and
in books about Shakespeare's tragedies that I must suppose it to be
natural to many readers. Yet I doubt whether it would be so if
Greek tragedy had never been written; and I must in candour confess
that to me it does not often occur while I am reading, or when I
have just read, a tragedy of Shakespeare. Wordsworth's lines, for
example, about
poor humanity's afflicted
will
Struggling in vain with ruthless
destiny
do not represent the impression I receive; much
less do images which compare man to a puny creature helpless in the
claws of a bird of prey. The reader should examine himself closely
on this matter.
13. It is dangerous, I think, in reference to all
really good tragedies, but I am dealing here only with
Shakespeare's. In not a few Greek tragedies it is almost inevitable
that we should think of justice and retribution, not only because
the dramatis personae often speak of them, but also because
there is something casuistical about the tragic problem itself. The
poet treats the story in such a way that the question, Is the hero
doing right or wrong? is almost forced upon us. But this is not so
with Shakespeare. Julius Caesar is probably the only one of
his tragedies in which the question suggests itself to us, and this
is one of the reasons why that play has something of a classic air.
Even here, if we ask the question, we have no doubt at all about
the answer.
14. It is most essential to remember that an evil
man is much more than the evil in him. I may add that in this
paragraph I have, for the sake of clearness, considered evil in its
most pronounced form; but what is said would apply, mutatis
mutandis, to evil as imperfection, etc.
15. Partly in order not to anticipate later
passages, I abstained from treating fully here the question why we
feel, at the death of the tragic hero, not only pain but also
reconciliation and sometimes even exultation. ...
Source Citation
Bradley, A. C. "The Substance of Shakespearean
Tragedy." Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan, 1904. 5-39. Rpt. in
Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 125.
Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 June
2010.
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