SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
Aristotelian Influence
Unlike Shakespearean comedy which traces its roots to the Medieval church, Shakespearean
tragedy finds its genesis in Greek drama. Indeed, tragedy is perhaps the oldest genre in that it
was described first by Aristotle almost 2000 years ago in his Poetics. From the very beginning of
the Poetics Aristotle employs descriptive terms that are still used today to discuss modern drama.
He says that "the object of tragic imitation is men in action." He underscores that tragedy
imitates characters [ethe], passions [pathe], and deeds or experience [praxis]:
1) Ethe: The characteristic moral qualities of a man--the permanent dispositions of the mind
which reveal a certain condition of the will
2) Pathe: The ever-changing feelings and emotions.
3) Praxis: The actions that are inwardly conceived and then rendered objectively on stage.
The management of a good plot concerns the relationship between peripetia (a special turn in the
action--what we might term today the climax) and anagnorisis (the recognition of what brings
about the peripetia). These two aspects of plot should be close together and should appear
naturally. The end of both peripetia and anagnorisis should lead to a catharsis for the audience (a
medical term literally meaning laxative--in this case meaning a release of fear and pity).
Furthermore, the plot should concern the fall of a noble man (if he is not noble or praiseworthy
there would be no reason to feel sorry for him) caused not by vice or depravity but by hamartia-"a missing of the mark," a frailty or error inherent to him, often referred to today as the tragic
flaw. Although hamartia is the Greek word used in the New Testament to express sin, that is not
the idea in Aristotelian tragedy. Rather, the hero falls because of some excess or mistake in
behavior, not because of a willful violation of the gods' laws. Situations where this fall results in
the murder of a brother by a brother, a father by a son, and so on best excite the audience's fear
and pity. Of course the play Aristotle had in mind as the definitive example of tragedy was
Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.
Aristotle's theory of tragedy may be thought of as follows:
1) Natural--based upon natural law
2) Organic--it is always growing, changing
3) Mimetic--it is an artistic imitation of life
4) Formal--it is an attempt to define the form of tragedy
5) Holistic--it argues for a certain unity
6) Psychological--it attempts to deal with the social psychology of the audience and the
protagonist
7) Therapeutic--it leads to catharsis
8) Paradoxical--it has twists in the plot
9) Experiential--concerned with human experience
To look for a point by point Aristotelian influence upon Shakespeare it of course impossible,
especially since it was only during Shakespeare's lifetime that many of the ancient texts were
being re-discovered and translated. At the same time, the indirect influence upon Shakespeare
and his contemporaries is unquestionable.
Shakespearean Tragedy and Character
At its very least, Shakespearean tragedy is pre-eminently the story of one person, the hero (and
on occasion the heroine). The story leads up to and includes the death of the hero (a person of
high degree); it is in fact essentially a tale of suffering and calamity leading to death. The
suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person and are
themselves of some striking kind, including being unexpected and contrasting with previous
happiness or glory. However, and this is important, the calamities of tragedy do not simply
happen, nor are they sent by the gods; they proceed mainly from actions, and those are the
actions of men. Consequently, the hero always contributes to the disaster in which he perishes; at
the same time, the center of tragedy may be said to lie in action issuing from character or in
character issuing in action. That is, the calamities and catastrophe follow inevitably from the
deeds of men, and the main source of the deeds is character.
There are some qualifications to made here regarding the role of character and tragedy. First,
Shakespeare sometimes represents abnormal states of mind: insanity, somnambulism,
hallucinations. Deeds done from these conditions are not what we can call deeds expressive of
character. However, these abnormal conditions are never introduced as the origin of deeds of any
dramatic moment. Second, the supernatural is sometimes introduced in his tragedies; ghosts and
witches appear who have supernatural knowledge. Yet the supernatural is always placed in the
closest relation to character. Third, he allows chance (any occurrence [not supernatural of
course] which enters the drama neither from the agency of a character nor from the obvious
surrounding circumstance) a large role in some of the action. This operation of chance is a fact of
human life and to exclude it wholly from tragedy would be to fail the truth. In addition, it is not
merely a fact; that men may start a course of events that they cannot control is a tragic fact, and
Shakespeare attempts to make us feel this.
The roles then of character and action in Shakespearean tragedy are obviously linked to the ideas
of Aristotle. What of the heroes themselves? What are their common qualities essential to the
tragic effect? Most of all, they are exceptional but this is more than just being of high degree.
Indeed, their natures are exceptional and in general raise them above the average level of
humanity. This is not to say they are monsters or saints; in fact his tragic characters are made of
the same stuff as we are, otherwise we would not identify with them. But they are intensified so
that the greatest of them are not like the people we meet everyday.
In almost all of them we see a particular obsession; a marked one-sidedness; a predisposition in some direction, a total incapacity, in certain instances, 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 is perhaps the fundamental tragic trait. It is a fatal gift,
but is carries with it a touch of greatness; there is something attractive about a man so possessed
with one concentrated activity. Unfortunately, his one-track focus destroys him. He errs by
action or omission and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. For Shakespeare,
the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien.
The World-View of Shakespearean Tragedy
Although the characters are obviously important in Shakespeare's tragedies, there is a kind of
operative controlling force that is present throughout. It would be comforting if we could easily
see the direct influence of a benevolent, personal God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Such,
however, is not the case. 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. He looked at this secular world most intently and seriously,
and he depicted it accurately without the compulsion to impose on it his own system of belief.
Tragedy within the context of this dramatic world must be qualified by two points. First, the
tragic actions appear piteous, fearful, and mysterious. Second, the presentation of the tragedy
does not leave us crushed, rebellious, or despairing. From the first point it follows that the
ultimate power in his tragic world is not adequately described as a law or order which we can see
to be just and benevolent--in the sense of 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 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.
Still, the idea that some kind of fate controls the dramatic world of Shakespearean tragedy is
hard to ignore. 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 their failings are 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. Many times we see men and women
confidently attempting to survive the tragic world. They strike into the existing order of things in
pursuit of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they intended; indeed, it is terribly
unlike it. They seem to understand very little of the world in which they operate. They fight
blindly in the dark, and the power that works through them makes them its instrument. They act
freely, and yet their action binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they
meant well or ill. Consequently, everywhere in the tragic world what characters intend is
translated into the opposite of what was intended. Their actions, seemingly insignificant, become
a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom. Whatever they dream of doing, they achieve
just the opposite and typically end in destroying themselves.
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 the cause of his own undoing, no matter how
slight. But other impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us feel that
man is terribly unlucky. The hero acts in accordance with his character, but what is it that brings
him just to the one problem that is most fatal to him and is presented to him when he is least
likely to be able to handle it? Furthermore, why is it that the hero's virtues help to destroy him,
and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with everything that is admirable in him?
It is obvious that these impressions about fate are in Shakespeare's tragedies. On the other hand,
there is practically no trace of fatalism in its more primitive, crude, and obvious forms. Nothing
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 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 do we receive the impression 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.
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 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 is called fate or not, it cannot be denied that
it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world.
Whatever may be said of accidents, circumstances and the like, human action is presented as the
central fact in tragedy and as the main cause of the catastrophe. That necessity which so much
impresses us is chiefly the necessary connection of cause and effect. For his own actions we tend
to hold the hero responsible. The critical action of the hero is to a greater or lesser degree bad or
wrong. The catastrophe is the return of this action on the head of the hero. Another way to say
this is that the ultimate power in a Shakespearean tragedy is a moral order. Thus, what a man
does in violation of the moral order must be inevitably paid back to him. Even if we confine our
attention to the heroes who are not guilty of overtly monstrous sins, even if they are
comparatively innocent, they still show some marked imperfection or defect--irresolution, pride,
credulousness, excessive simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and so on.
These defects are certainly in the widest sense evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict
and catastrophe.
To conclude, Shakespeare was not trying 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 in any direction where a
solution might lie. Good and evil are both present in his tragedies, first one in control and then
the other. Perhaps it is his faithful presentation of these two conflicting forces as they affect man
that makes his tragedies so fascinating and compelling.
Don King
Professor of English, Montreat College
(Notes taken from Aristotle's Poetics and A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy.)