SHAKESPEARE’S GREAT TRAGEDIES

Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, written in his second period of creation, preserve the pattern of the

“fall of princes”, common in the Renaissance. This is the traditional pattern for tragedy, as laid out by Aristotle

in his Poetics – according to him, tragedy was supposed to deal with the downfall of a noble character, enjoying

“reputation and prosperity”, on whom disaster was brought not by vice or depravity but by “some error of

judgement” (hamartia).

Shakespeare adds to this model philosophical and ethical implications of the deepest significance, and in

his tragedies the downfall of the tragic hero is accompanied by the destruction of a natural order, by the chaos

arising from the corruption and collapse of values. Unlike in classical Greek tragedy, where the heroes battle

against divine forces and are caught in an inescapable divine plan, in Shakespeare’s plays there is little

intrusion of “fate” or “destiny”. Although the characters do have the sense an ordering force structuring the

universe and often look to heaven to find explanation for what has occurred – or to avoid responsibility for it –,

human action is not presented as determined or influenced by transcendent forces. The cause of human

suffering in Shakespeare’s tragedies is human action itself, the implication being that humans are free to

choose, and that the limitations of their choices are not imposed from without, but come from within. The

qualities of the heroes, the greatness that entitles them to the position of prominence, are precisely the ones

that bring them down. Still, Shakespeare’s extraordinary dramatic gift deepens the complexity of the conflict by

preserving a certain mystery about the tragic experience and the reasons for human action, and by dramatizing

the search for the knowledge of such things in contexts which are unpropitious to certainty.

The issues that are explored dramatically in Shakespeare’s great tragedies reflect the spirit of

uncertainty and increasing scepticism of a baroque age. He is concerned here with the paradoxes in the

relationship between reality and appearance, between truth and falsehood, with the effects of evil on

innocence, with the consequences of imperfect knowledge and self-blindness, with the human endeavour

to understand if suffering is part of the natural order of things or if it betrays the indifference of Nature – or

God – towards man.

It is in these four tragedies that Shakespeare gives the full proof of his artistic genius. The enlargement

of meaning through consistent patterns of imagery running throughout each play, the masterful treatment of

highly complex characters, the intensity of poetic expression – especially in the soliloquies – are features that

rank these plays highest in the whole history of the genre.

Hamlet: a revenge play

In Hamlet (1600-1), the first in this series of masterpieces, Shakespeare deals with his great tragic

themes in the frame of a revenge tragedy. Upon his return to Denmark from his university studies, young

prince Hamlet learns from the ghost of his recently dead father, old king Hamlet, that he had actually been

poisoned by his brother, Claudius, who was now the new king and who had married Gertrude, the widow queen.

Young Hamlet is thus confronted with the horrors of fratricide and incest, and with the immense burden of

revenge, required by his dead father.

In order to find confirmation for the ghost’s story, Hamlet arranges a play to be performed at court.

During the play, which represents a similar scene of murder, Claudius’s guilty conscience betrays him.

Hamlet hides his terrible grief behind the mask of madness, and continually delays the act of revenge,

absorbed more and more by his consciousness of the paradoxes of his difficult task of exposing the truth.

At one point, he has the occasion to kill Claudius, but refrains from doing it as the latter was in prayer. In

another scene, he kills Polonius, a courtier, mistaking him for Claudius. Polonius is the father of beautiful Ophelia,

rejected by Hamlet in spite of their mutual affection, as he now sees in her only another embodiment of woman’s

frailty.

Sent on a diplomatic mission to England, Hamlet escapes a criminal plot set up by Claudius, who

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suspects him of aspiring to take his throne. Back to the castle, Hamlet learns that Ophelia, who had really gone

mad, has drowned herself. Her brother, Laertes, accepts Claudius’s treacherous plan of killing Hamlet during a

duel, with a poisoned sword, but the plot escapes their control and, in the confusions of the final scene, all the

main protagonists find their death.

In spite of this bloody outcome, the play ends on a note of hope, when Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince and

glorious military hero, takes over the rule of Denmark, bringing in the prospect of renewal and of the restoration of order.

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most complex and most difficult play, and its interpretations have been

astonishingly varied and contradictory. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other Romantics (including Goethe) saw

Hamlet’s hesitation and delay in killing Claudius as the central problem in the play and the main cause of the

prince’s tragedy, establishing thus a critical tradition with a long career. Hamlet’s hesitation and doubt have

been explained either as coming from an oversensitive nature, incapable of violent action, or as the result of

psychic shock at his own father’s death. Psychoanalytic criticism, initiated by Freud’s own remarks on

Shakespeare in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and amply continued by his disciple Ernest Jones, explained

Hamlet’s hesitation by his unconscious identification with Claudius, who has fulfilled Hamlet’s own unconscious

Oedipal desire to take his father’s place. Hamlet’s radical doubt and self-questioning, paralyzing his action, have

been seen by an outstanding critic like T. S. Eliot as the cause of the play’s failure as a dramatic construct, as, in his

opinion, Shakespeare was unable to “manipulate into art” an emotion which appeared to be “in excess”, out of

proportion with the facts – there is no “objective correlative” – i.e. corresponding factual structure – for the intense

emotion in the play.

Actually, much of the play’s charm and meaning come from Hamlet’s hesitation and long delay. Like

Brutus, in Julius Caesar, Hamlet is an intellectual approaching life philosophically, who finds himself called to

fulfill the enormous task of restoring the moral order of the past in a society where all values seem to have been

corrupted. Tragically, Hamlet feels overwhelmed by this task:

“The Time is out of joint! Oh, cursed spiteThat ever I was born to set it right.”

His penetrating spirit has discerned a reality of human nature that he had not suspected, and this makes

him now aware of the ironies and ambiguities inherent in the discrepancy between what is and what seems.

His effort to see beyond the veil of illusion, his obsessive quest for truth and certainty, is eminently a

philosopher’s effort, and this may explain his indefinite postponing of the revenge, his incapacity to act.

Hamlet’s introspective, questioning side is exacerbated by the irruption of evil in a universe that he had thought

well-ordered. His intellectual energies are now concentrated in his search for the meaning of the ultimate

questions of life and death, of human suffering.

These explorations become more important than the technical matter of revenge, which would not undo

the past. Hamlet’s tragedy is one of moral frustration, as he seems to suspect that no avenging murder can

bring his shattered universe to coherence again, restoring the idealized image of his mother or the innocence of

his love for Ophelia. He is the morally outraged man, who knows that justice demands action, but who feels

tormented by the higher awareness that no action can ever undo the past.

Hamlet has been seen as the embodiment of the ideal Renaissance prince – refined and cultivated,

sensitive and idealistic, brave, generous and brilliantly intelligent. Confronted with the moral corruption around

him, Hamlet feels all his certainties destroyed. His new consciousness that “something’s rotten in Denmark”

plunges him into a nightmare, in which all the values on which he had relied have lost their meaning.

In Hamlet’s tormented soul, the balance and confidence of the Renaissance man have been replaced by

scepticism and mistrust. The sign of this confusion is the typically baroque motif of Hamlet’s madness, which

is only partly dissimulated. Madness becomes the refuge of the sensitive conscience from moral chaos. It allows

the hero to take distance from the corrupt order of the “prison” that Denmark has become for him.

To be or to seem: Othello

Evil coming from those who are naturally closest to us is intolerable, and its outburst is always

accompanied by the awakening of the tragic hero’s consciousness of the divorce between seeming and being.

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In Othello (1604-5), the bond of a love marriage is the frame in which Shakespeare explores the theme of

evil in connection with that of appearance vs. essence. The noble protagonist, Othello, a brave and honest

general of the Venetian republic, is led by Iago to believe his wife Desdemona unfaithful, and this destroys his

confidence in a moral order. Iago, Othello’s ensign, is jealous of Cassio, who has been promoted to lieutenant,

and cunningly plots his fall from Othello’s favour and the loss of his newly acquired rank. At Iago’s perverse

suggestion, Cassius asks Desdemona to intercede with Othello for his restoration in office, but the mind of Othello

has become poisoned by Iago’s insinuations that Cassius might be Desdemona’s lover. Iago even arranges for

proof: Cassius “happens” to find and to display before Othello the handkerchief that had been his gift to

Desdemona.

As a result of these manipulations, Othello is thrown into the terrible agony of suspecting that beauty

and innocence might disguise corruption. With his mind darkened by the false evidence of Desdemona’s

infidelity, Othello kills her, and takes his own life when her innocence is proved to him.

In Othello, evil succeeds precisely because of the perfection of Desdemona’s purity and Othello’s trusting

nature, and the tragic disaster shows how the play of appearances can dissolve firm moral opposites like

truth/lie, innocence/guilt, faithfulness/betrayal. Desdemona has defied her own father in choosing Othello, and

she is hurt and bewildered when Othello lets his anger loose on her, but she never gives up faith in her husband

or question her choice of him. She does not understand what happens, but dies with her love and faith intact.

What makes the tragedy so painful is that innocence, generosity, and virtue can be turned into means of

disaster and misery. Othello’s modesty and trust in his own happiness make him vulnerable to Iago. He is a man

used to meeting a situation with the appropriate action, but, because of Iago, he is confronted with a monstrous

situation, which undermines his rational judgement, and about which nothing appropriate can really be done –

as in Hamlet. But, unlike Hamlet, Othello is not an introspective philosopher, and the immediate response to the

destruction of his world is not speculation, but action. His murder of Desdemona is not motivated by jealousy as

much as by anguish at the thought that the apparent beauty and innocence of the centre of his universe might

in fact disguise corruption and treachery.

Iago is Shakespeare’s arch-villain – fundamentally duplicitous, ambitious, envious, cynical, unfaithful,

ungrateful, cowardly, contemptuous and hateful of people, and a terrifyingly skilled manipulator, proud of his

ability to pull strings. Coleridge saw in him the embodiment of “motiveless malignity” (although Shakespeare

does give reasons for his jealousy), and in some measure he is the inheritor of characters like Judas or Vice in

medieval drama, whom the audience accepted as evil without expecting motivation. With him, the word

“honest”, obsessively repeated in the play by various characters, acquires sharply ironic undertones, and the theme

of truth vs. deception is explored from the very first scene in the play, when Iago confesses to his friend Roderigo

his self-interest in serving Othello, and when he reveals with a certain exhilaration his duplicitous nature: “I am not

what I am”.

King Lear: the madness of tragic grief

King Lear (1605-6), another “fall of princes” tragedy, starts with a folk tale motif: old Lear plans to leave

his kingdom to his three daughters if he is pleased with their declarations of love. Disappointed by the reticence

of his youngest daughter, Cordelia, whom he disinherits, Lear becomes the victim of the ingratitude of his two

elder daughters, Goneril and Reagan, who deprive him of all prerogatives and turn him out of their castles.

Maddened with grief, exiled Lear wanders in a terrible storm in the company of Edgar, son of Lear’s loyal

supporter, the Earl of Gloucester. He is also accompanied by the faithful Earl of Kent in disguise and by the

Court Fool. Edgar, who is disguised as a lunatic beggar, is also an exile from his own family, as his father has

been deceived by his other son Edmund, a bastard, to believe him a traitor and usurper.

The Earl of Gloucester joins them, after his eyes have been put out for having helped Lear, and he is thus

reunited with his son without knowing it. Edgar, like Lear’s daughter Cordelia, is the victim of a staged play of

appearances; in reality, both of them prove to be the loyal, unconditionally loving ones. Edgar helps his blinded

father to reach Dover, where Cordelia has landed with French troops to assist Lear, brought there by Kent. In

the battle that follows, Lear and Cordelia, now reconciled, are captured. Cordelia is killed at the order of

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Edmund; Regan poisons Goneril out of jealousy and for love of Edmund, and, when the latter is killed by Edgar,

she commits suicide. Before Gloucester dies, he and Edgar are reconciled, and, after the death of Lear,

maddened by grief at the death of Cordelia, the reunited kingdom is left to Albany, Goneril’s husband, to rule.

The main themes developed throughout the play are those of true vs. false vision, of self-knowledge

and self-blindedness, and of “naturalness”. Lear goes through the painful lesson of seeing “naturally”, as a

man, and not artificially as a king, and, like Gloucester, has to get rid of a false vision of his responsibilities. Both

old men are “educated” in the great truths of life, gaining their understanding only in their physical blindness.

A remarkable achievement in this play is the transformation of a stock Elizabethan character, the Fool,

into a kind of chorus. His commentaries on Lear’s actions create an ironic level of perception, on which the king

appears to act foolishly, while the Fool proves to be wise. By skillfully bringing together Edgar, with his disguised

madness, which helps him endure his suffering, Lear, who is truly going mad, and the “professional” Fool, whose

comments hide much wisdom under the appearance of playful nonsense, Shakespeare explores the paradoxes

of the relation between pretense and reality.

The motif of madness, like that of blindness, is closely linked, through paradox, to the themes of

knowledge and self-knowledge, of truth and illusion. Lear’s own madness marks in fact a growth in his

moral understanding, and, as in Hamlet, the quest for higher meanings. In the beginning Lear is concerned with

revenge and with the personal injustice he has suffered at the hand of his daughters; as his madness grows, he

begins to strive to understand the roots of evil, if there is a purpose for its existence in the world of man; he is

wondering: “Is there a cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?”

Shakespeare develops the theme of evil by contrasting the natural order of the moral universe with

the chaos produced by the unnatural acts which violate this order. Evil is that which destroys Nature, acting

against it. He gives a special intensity to this theme by dealing with evil in the context of the most natural of

human relationships: kinship (relations by blood or by marriage). Claudius’s fratricide in Hamlet and the cruelty

of Lear’s daughters are transgressions which turn the tragic hero’s world upside down. On the other hand, both

Lear and Gloucester have violated nature in rejecting Cordelia and Edgar respectively, but they retain our

sympathy, however, because their error comes from moral blindness, not from evil hearts, while Goneril, Regan

and Edmund are pure villains, the embodiment of perverted nature.

The storm scenes in the play contain the highest symbolic concentration. The storm outside matches

the storm in Lear’s hurt soul; there is madness in nature itself, an outburst of violence which evokes to Lear the

cruelty of his daughters. In the famous scene 2 of Act III, Lear accepts the cruelty of the storm, because it is

natural, as opposed to the unnatural malice of his own offspring:

“I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness;I never gave you kingdom, called you children;You owe me no subscription. Then let fallYour horrible pleasure. Here I stand, your slave,A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man; But yet I call you servile ministersThat will with two pernicious daughters joinYour high-engendered battles, ‘gainst a headSo old and white as this (…)”

The pervasive imagery of animals of prey and of bodily pain and suffering conveys the sense of the

active ferocity of evil forces, overwhelming the universe and threatening humanity itself with annihilation: we

are made to feel that, if the gods do not intervene, the end can only be that

“Humanity must perforce prey on itselfLike monsters of the deep.”

As in Shakespeare’s other tragedies, the gods remain hidden – more than that, Gloucester attributes

them not only indifference, but delight in the pain of humans. King Lear is a “study in human torture”, reflecting

Shakespeare’s growing concern with the incalculable effects of evil in man’s nature and the complexities and

paradoxes of the moral universe.

Macbeth: the tragedy of “diseased” conscience

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In Macbeth (1605-6), the horror of evil is amplified by the fact that the protagonist’s crime is

committed against a man who is at the same time his king, kinsman and guest. Returning victorious from a

battle, Macbeth and Banquo, generals of Duncan, encounter three witches, who inflame Macbeth’s ambitions by

the prediction that he shall be king of Scotland. Persuaded by his wife to hasten the fulfilment, Macbeth kills the

sleeping king and takes the throne. The effects of this sacrilege against Nature are devastating. Macbeth’s

conscience soon starts accusing him, but, at the instigation of his wife, he multiples his crimes, arranging the

murder of all those who might threaten his power. To prevent a second prophecy by the three “weird sisters”

from happening, Macbeth plots the murder of Banquo (hailed by the witches as “begetter of kings”) and of his

whole family, but the latter’s son, Fleance (reputed ancestor of James I), manages to escape.

A second encounter with the witches, after Macbeth’s visitation by Banquo’s ghost, leads to a new series

of crimes. Warned against Macduff, a Scottish nobleman who suspected and opposed him, Macbeth is however

reassured by the prophecy that “none of woman born” can harm him, that he shall be unvanquished “until /

Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him”. When Macduff joins Malcolm, Duncan’s

exiled son, in England, Macbeth orders the murder of Lady Macduff and her children.

The evil reverberates in the whole land: in the words of Malcolm, “Our country sinks beneath the yoke, /

It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds.” The imagery of disease is extended to

the protagonist’s conscience, invaded by “horrible imaginings” and hallucinations. Lady Macbeth becomes

insane from guilt, and there is “no sweet oblivious antidote” to cure her “diseased” mind either, and she is

destroyed by the unbearable burden of sin, from which the ultimate relief is suicide. Left alone by his former

supporters, Macbeth is finally defeated by Macduff, whose soldiers had cut Birnam trees and were wearing them

as a cover to approach Macbeth’s castle. In the combat, Macbeth learns that Macduff was not “born” of his

mother, but brought into life by a Caesarian operation – thus the prophecy of the witches is fulfilled.

Macbeth’s heroic strength of will enables him to survive the terrible inner torments, and he meets his

punishment in the final battle, in which he fights to the end with the same determination that had brought him

the glory of a hero at the beginning of the play.

Shakespeare’s shortest and most poetic tragedy reveals the terrible effects of the darkness which may

cloud the moral conscience of a noble hero. Macbeth’s delusion about the values worth pursuing in life leads

him to commit the most appalling crimes, which reduce him to moral nothingness and forfeit his humanity. He is

not a monster; in Lady Macbeth’s words, he seems, in the beginning, too “full of the milk of human kindness / To

catch the nearest way”. Symbolically, the witches represent, however, Macbeth’s submerged dreams, his

unconscious desires and ambitions, and the apparent determination of Lady Macbeth encourages him to bring

them to the surface and act on them. The first murder constitutes indeed a “breach in nature / For ruin’s

wasteful entrance”, as it will open the door to ever more brutality, and sin will breed more sin. The abominable

crime begins quickly to work on the hero’s conscience, as his hallucination proves (Act II, scene 2):

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Macbeth: Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep,Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,Chief nourisher in life’s feast (…).

(Romanian translation by Ion Vinea)

Macbeth: Mi s-a părut c-aud un glas strigând:“Nu mai dormi! Macbeth ucide somnul”Nevinovatul somn, cel ce desfaceFuiorul încâlcit al grijii – somnul:El, moartea vieţii fiecărei zile,El, scalda grelei trude şi balsamulDurerii sufleteşti, şi-a doua manăA marii firi, iar la ospăţul vieţiiCel mai de seamă fel.

“The innocent sleep” is the symbol of moral integrity, of a clean mind; as “chief nourisher” in life’s feast,

sleep (i.e. innocent conscience) is part of the natural order of man’s existence. Macbeth’s feeling that he has lost

this privilege of nature reflects his awareness that his “unnatural” deed is a violation of moral law – which is

“natural”. The theme of the “unnaturalness” of evil is prominent in Macbeth, too.

The most tragic consequence of Macbeth’s yielding to evil is his final loss of the belief in any meaning of life.

Before his confrontation with Macduff, at the end, after having just learned the news of Lady Macbeth’s suicide (Act

V, scene 5), he utters the play’s most “baroque” soliloquy, voicing the despair of a sick conscience at the sudden

realization of the ephemerality of life, the vainness of all human ambition and endeavour, the illusory nature of our

aspirations and acts, and the ultimate meaninglessness of the temporary show that is human life:

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Macbeth: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time;And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more; it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.

(Romanian translation by Ion Vinea)

Macbeth: Dar mâine şi iar mâine, tot mereu,Cu pas mărunt se-alungă zi de zi,Spre cel din urmă semn din cartea vremii,Şi fiecare “ieri” a luminatNebunilor pe-al morţii drum de colb.Te stinge, lumânare de o clipă!

Ni-e viaţa doar o umbră călătoare,Un biet actor, ce-n ceasul lui pe scenăSe grozăveşte şi se tot frământăŞi-n urmă nu mai este auzit.E o poveste spusă de-un nătâng,Din vorbe-alcătuită şi din zbuciumŞi nensemnând nimic.

To give poetic expression to the intensity of Macbeth’s inner life and to explore in all their complexities his tragic

themes (good vs. evil; choice and responsibility; appearance vs. reality; human behaviour and natural order, etc.),

Shakespeare achieves in this most poetic of his tragedies an impressive orchestration of meaning by means of

patterns of recurring images and overtones of suggestion. Macbeth’s moral degradation, for instance, is suggested

by a consistent pattern of clothes imagery (e.g. the metaphor of loose garments, unsuited to him or belonging to

someone else, reveals other character’s feelings about Macbeth’s entitlement to the position and competence of a

king). The consequences of Macbeth’s evil deeds are suggested as overwhelming and enduring by frequent

auditory images related to the reverberation of sound echoing over vast regions. The symbolism of darkness and

light, or of sin as a disease are also means by which the poet intensifies the dramatic tension and forces us into

empathy with the main character.

The stylistic sobriety of this last great tragedy, the conciseness and depth of the metaphors, the

comprehensiveness of the symbolism, the dramatic economy and intensity, the profundity of the thought, the

assuredness with which Shakespeare probes into the abysses of man’s heart show the consummate genius of the

poet-playwright.