SHAKESPEARE
AND
TRAGEDY
Bevington, etal. SHAKESPEARE STAGE,
SCREEN AND FILM, pp 497-499.
Defining tragedy
Shakespeare’s career coincided with the revival of
interest in the classics and renewed fascination with
tragedy.
Aristotle and tragedy
Aristotle theorized the genre by examining the Greek
plays of the 5th century, most notably OEDIPUS THE
KING.
According to Aristotle…
• Tragic action must have a beginning, middle and end
• Must be of a certain magnitude
• Evoke pity and fear and by arousing emotions, purge
them (catharsis)
• Tragic hero was an exceptional person
• Hero could not avoid fate
• Conflicts are resolved by the hero’s downfall and often
the destruction of others
Without exception, Shakespeare’s tragedies do end with
the death of the protagonist
Defining Shakespearean Tragedy
• Shakespeare and his
contemporaries did not
model their work upon
Greek models
• Their models were the
Roman plays of Seneca
that inspired early works
like Gorboduc (1565)
and The Spanish Tragedy
(1592)
The English morality play
The battle of good against evil as evidenced in the
morality plays of the age before Shakespeare was
another source of inspiration.
The Mirror for Magistrates
The Mirror for Magistrates
is a collection of English
poems from the Tudor
period by various authors
which retell the lives and
the tragic ends of various
historical figures. It
provides another source
for Renaissance tragedies
by Shakespeare and his
contemporaries.
Shakespeare’s invention
• In comparison to the morality plays and the de causibus
tradition (exemplified by The Mirror for Magistrates),
Shakespeare’s tragedies are secular although the terms
in which several of his heroes understand their suffering
and death are recognizably Christian.
• Shakespeare departed from the Greeks in that they do
not follow the classic unities of time, place and action
• Several of the tragedies are based upon historical or
quasi-historical figures: King Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet.
Romeo and Juliet and Othello are set in Italy.
A career-long pursuit
He wrote tragedies
throughout his career. Many
feel that his last six, written
between 1600 and 1608
reflect a turn to pessimism:
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,
Macbeth, Antony and
Cleopatra and Coriolanus.
His early tragedies, Titus
Andronicus and Romeo and
Juliet seem less complex in
comparison.
Shakepeare tended to
follow the form of the Roman
tragedian Seneca.
Seneca’s works translated
During the reign of Elizabeth all the ten
tragedies then ascribed to Seneca were
translated into English verse. Three of
these -- Troas, Thyestes, and Hercules
Furens -- were translated by Jasper
Heywood, younger son of John
Heywood, a fellow of All Souls' College,
Oxford. Alexander Neville, a Cambridge
student translated Oedipus. John Studley,
scholar and fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, was responsible for the
versions of Agamemnon, Medea,
Hercules Oetaeus, and Hippolytus.
Thomas Nuce, fellow of Pembroke Hall,
Cambridge, translated Octavia; and the
remaining play, or rather fragments of
two plays, Thebais, or as it is sometimes
called Phoenissae, was rendered into
English by Thomas Newton, who had
been a student at both Oxford and
Cambridge.
Comic vs. Tragic view
Comedy represents a social order flexible enough to
welcome changing values, new perceptions and
aberrant behavior. Tragedy represents societies
thrown into crisis in which the hero must respond.
He emphasizes character
over fate
His protagonists shape
their own destinies.
Edwin Booth as Hamlet
in the mid-19th century.
Romeo and Juliet
The least Aristotelian of the tragedies.
Othello
The most Aristotelian of the tragedies.
He matures with age…
Many feel that his last six,
written between 1600 and
1608 reflect a turn to
pessimism: Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear,
Macbeth, Antony and
Cleopatra and
Coriolanus.
His early tragedies,
Titus Andronicus 
and Romeo and Juliet
seem less complex in
comparison.
Psychological realism
Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear and
Macbeth share
a sophisticated
psychological
realism.
HAMLET
Hamlet, like the play that bears his name, is in a class
by himself. Some have found his “tragic flaw” to be
inaction. He seems to move toward an acceptance
of his fate—“the readiness is all.”
Famous Soliloquys
• All of his mature heroes are
self-reflective and share
those thoughts in famous
soliloquys. These four plays
take readers and audiences
into the deepest and most
universal of human desires
and fears.
• Shakespeare’s tragic
endings do not always follow
the pattern of catharsis
defined by Aristotle.
An illustration from Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn.
“Invention of the human”
The difficulty of defining
Shakespearean tragedy
may in fact be a
symptom of the play’s
greatness and their
humanity. (According
to Harold Bloom – the
invention of the
human.)
Samuel Johnson
In his 1765 edition of the plays, Samuel
Johnson wrote this preface:
“Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous
and critical sense either tragedies or
comedies, but compositions of a distinct
kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary
nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy
and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of
proportion and innumerable modes of
combination; and expressing the course of
the world, in which the loss of one is the gain
of another; in which, at the same time, the
reveller is hasting to his wine, and the
mourner burying his friend; in which the
malignity of one is sometimes defeated by
the frolick of another; and many mischiefs
and many benefits are done and hindered
without design.”
Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1594)
Romeo and Juliet (1595)
Julius Caesar (1599)
Hamlet (1600)
Troilus & Cressida (1601)
Othello (1604)
King Lear (1605)
The Scottish Play (1605)
MACBETH
Antony and Cleopatra (1606)
Coriolanus (1607)
Timon of Athens (1608)