Introduction

My name is Rodri Lewis,

and I'm professor of English here at Princeton University.

I'm going to be talking, to you today a little bit about,

Shakespearean tragedy.

Starting out with an overview of some of the things that,

I take to be distinctive about Shakespearean tragedy,

and then moving on to look at,

four of, Shakespeare's plays.

It's Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and,

Macbeth.

I suppose there are two ways, two main ways of looking at,

Shakespearean tragedy,

and my starting point today is going to be the contention that

both of them are wrong.

The first of them

derives from Aristotle and from his poetics.

And as I'm sure most of you know,

the Poetics outline a a model of tragedy,

in which a plot,

that is ordered by the principles of probability and necessity

and gives voice to

grand characters,

and grand philosophical thoughts expressed by those characters.

This plot, by bringing the main character,

the protagonist low,

and then somehow or other, revealing to him,

and it's usually him,

what has the nature of his mistake.

This plot gives rise to feelings of

pity and of fear, which in turn give rise

to the much contested term of catharsis.

All sorts of interesting things to say about that in

relationship to Shakespeare, and I'll say a couple in a moment.

But before I do, the second, main, interpretative,

model for assessing the plays,

and it's the one that probably has slightly more in common

with them than the Aristotelian one,

is one derived from the writings of Hegel,

the German idealist, romantic,

writer.

And for Hegel and for many of the romantics at the beginning

of the nineteenth century,

tragedy was interesting not,

in the Aristotelian sense as a as a as a way of generating,

fear and pity and then catharsis,

but as a sort of hotline to,

the the fundamentals of history.

And, of course, by history,

the romantics and the Hegel and Hegel and the idealists don't

mean don't mean, the the sort of catalog of events,

the chronicle of events that we might think of in those terms.

They mean the sort of deep animating spirit and ideas that

have shaped human history.

For them, the ancient Athenians,

particularly Sophocles and Aeschylus,

they gave rise to a kind of tragedy which

reflected a dilemma that people in those days had

between sort of conflicted duties.

One,

internal, the other external.

You might, for example,

find yourself torn between loyalty to your family and

loyalty to the law and tragedy,

is a way of bringing those two things or reconciling those two

things and enabling history to move forwards.

For them, Shakespeare is important because he marks the the point

at which tragedy stops being

about conflicting goods, between sort of social goods

and public goods and private interest.

And that dilemma goes inside,

becomes internal to a particular character.

He may, Hamlet for example,

can't quite decide whether he is able for himself

to commit an act of vengeance

despite the fact that it goes against,

the the the the letter of both the religious and the

civil law of of his Denmark.

And that sort of inner that inner angst

pulls him apart, in various interesting ways,

but also makes him stand up as a sort of representative

of the modern subjective human being.

The human being in modern time who is kind of split

inwardly rather than, subject to various different, dilemmas.

From the romantics,

that's much of what has gone wrong with the modern world,

a sort of divorce between meaningful public life,

and, inner, integrity.

Now I said both of these views,

are wrong as far as Shakespearean

tragedy is concerned and these are big claims that I should stand up.

The reason they're wrong is that what both have in common

is the view that the world is comprehensible to human agency and reason.

This, I suggest, is anathema to Shakespeare,

and to tragedy as Shakespeare understood it.

Precisely because for Shakespeare,

tragedy, I think, and for Shakespearean tragedy,

is about exploring what happens when we bump up against the

limits of human comprehension and about the ways in which we

tend to behave when doing so.

Shakespeare shares Aristotle's view that the,

job of tragedy is to imitate our everyday experience,

the extreme versions of our everyday experience.

Where he differs, is in the view that everyday

experience is something that we are

equipped as, rational animals to make sense of.

And there's all sorts of things one

could, say about that,

but I think that the headline would be that he's interested

in finding forms of aesthetic dramatic order through tragedy

that enable him to represent the sort

of conflicted, the contingent, the confusing,

and irreducibly confusing nature of human experience,

through a form of art that will communicate to other people.

Part of this, I think,

is dramatizing the illusions in his tragedies of those who

profess philosophical, political, and religious certainty.

But part of it is also suggesting about suggesting

that tragedy, as traditionally understood,

is itself a way in which we tell ourselves that we get it

in one way or another.

Shakespeare's

engagements with these ideas, I think,

are are are sort of numerous.

One very obvious one, would be the the inset play at

the center of Hamlet, The Murder of Gonzago,

which Hamlet adapts as the mousetrap.

Hamlet, sort of voices all kinds of conventional ideas about what

tragedy might be able to do.

But there is result of that within the play itself is

profoundly ambiguous.

Nobody really knows what's happened,

after the mousetrap has finished,

although Hamlet with sort of forensic exaltation

thinks he does.

And that that sort of sense of unease, I think,

is supposed to set traditional versions of tragedy,

at a disadvantage against the kinds of kinds of

work that Shakespeare is, asking it to do.

Now these are very brief remarks,

and I don't want to go on into too much further detail,

but, I just want to pick out two two sort of examples of

what I mean about Shakespeare,

sort of subverting normal tragic norms and using that

subversion as a building block for, his own tragic practice.

Most of you are familiar with the Aristotelian ideas of,

peripeteia and anagnoresis,

the moment of reversal

when the when the tragic character realizes, you know,

oh god, she was my mom.

And then the moment of anegoresis or recognition

where, he begins to understand, you know, what that means,

what what that means about him,

what that means about the world,

in various different ways.

And that anegoresis,

that recognition is supposed in the traditional

theory to clear the way to a resolved ending where,

you know, we in the audience,

like I suppose those on the stage,

are offered a version of resolution in

which in which the the sort of heart rending things we have

seen going on,

are are are sort of all sort of made sense of.

Order is in some measure, restored.

Now Shakespeare is very familiar with with I don't

think Shakespeare read the poetics,

but he's very familiar with the Aristotelian ideas,

which are a staple of works like Philip Sidney's

Defense of Poetry,

which was published a little bit before Shakespeare began

writing, which he certainly knew, very well.

I wanna give you two examples of how he seems to be going along with this,

but actually takes it in a very different direction.

The first comes from Hamlet where,

he Hamlet is on a boat to to England,

and he, uncovers the letter,

that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are carrying from

his uncle to the king of England.

And, obviously, this contains disturbing news.

Various things occur.

But at this point, he he he suddenly,

has this moment of recognition or at least as he tells it to

Horatio afterwards where he begins to understand that

actually, you know,

it's all part of God's plan not his own plan.

And this is this is kind of working with the grammar of

tragic, expectation.

But rather when he gets back to Denmark,

rather than have this lead into something that is, coherent,

and and, restorative of some kind of order,

this moment of recognition of anagloresis

leads merely to a bloodbath in which,

Laertes, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude,

all lie dead, on the stage with very little

rhyme or reason behind it.

And so this this sense of resolution is frustrated,

and I think it's further frustrated by the fact that

Shakespeare brings in a sort of curious

ending, which is this this this Norwegian

thuggish warlord, who kills for kicks is is,

invited in to become the new king.

And we are all in some sense or other,

supposed to, celebrate this.

And it's, it's a very discomforting,

very deliberately,

disorienting way to end a play,

the more so because it looks like it is following the

Aristotelian tragic grammar.

Another example which I'll do much more quickly I hope is

from King Lear, where,

Lear has been, reunited with Cordelia

towards the end of the play.

And there's a moment of,

his reversal he acknowledged his reversal as a moment of

recognition happening where he sort of,

apologizes and she says don't worry no fault no fault.

And it's a gorgeous heart rending scene,

which might very well lend itself to the kind of

resolution that Aristotle thinks should be at the end of a tragedy.

But, for the Shakespeare of Lear,

it's actually setting us up for heartbreak because Cordelia is

going to be killed unnecessarily,

because the order for her hanging was not countermandered

in time, and Lear will then die of heartbreak.

And just as in Hamlet,

a sort of faux order is restored at the end,

a cosmetic order is restored at the end by the arrival of Fort

Inbras and his army, so in King Lear,

Albany and Kent, two sort of,

if we're being slightly provocative,

slightly over overpromoted middle managers are left to

inherit the kingdom, mouthing their platitudes,

in a way that doesn't show any real understanding of the

horror and the heartrending horror,

the pity and the fear we in the audience have just experienced.

And, again, it is a deliberately

discomforting, subverting,

and,

well, heartrending, literally,

model of tragic practice.

And that, in short, is,

one of the reasons why

Shakespeare does not fit any model of tragedy that requires

a governing ideology,

whether that's philosophical or aesthetic

or political, or religious.

Tragedy for Shakespeare is about bumping up against the

limits of what we are able to know and understand,

and exert some degree of human agency over.