Shakespeare's major tragedies and their themes

¶ … Shakespeare Never Read Aristotle?

Or, the dynamic forms of catharsis and tragic flaws in Shakespeare's plays

Shakespeare's most beloved plays are his tragedies. If one were to list his best and most popular plays: Othello, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and so forth, one would find the list comprised almost entirely of tragedies. So it would not be amiss to say that much of the modern literary conception of theatrical tragedy is shaped and influenced by Shakespeare. At the same time, the definitions of the tragic form as understood at the roots of theatrical history (in Greco-Roman times) continue to be part and parcel of the official comprehension of tragedy. Many critics have sought to fore Shakespeare into the mold of tragedy defined in Aristotle's Poetica, and many others have rightfully protested that he was not cast from that mold, and that in fact he owes little to it. Speaking for the traditionalists, Robert Di Yanni claims that Shakespeare follows the Aristotelian forms entirely. According to Dieter Mehl, many critics feel that Shakespeare follows no strict form whatsoever. He quotes Brantley as saying, "There is no such thing as Shakespearian Tragedy: there are only Shakespearian tragedies," (2) and personally suggests that the bard cannot be entirely predicted or codified. Alfred Harbage goes one farther, pointing out that not only did Shakespeare not follow the forms of Aristotle, but that all similarities are somewhat coincidental, as the historical playwright would not have been familiar with Aristotle's demands! It seems that the truth is to be found in a balance between these positions. One must comprehend the degree to which Aristotle was voicing not an arbitrary way of creating art but the natural and universal expression of what Plato might call a tragic Form, and in recognizing that the written script is only one half of the completed work - so that both meanings and adherence to the form may be altered both by the critical and the creative eye. Shakespeare's meanings are sufficiently universal as to be simultaneously capable of fulfilling and denying Aristotle's generalizations, and as Hamlet has said, when it comes to interpretation: "Thinking makes it so."

According to Yanni and to the general conception of the critical public, there are three basic demands made by Aristotle regarding tragedy. It must be the story of an exalted figure with some tragic flaw. The play must progress logically and cleanly step-by-step to the hero's doom, as his own tragic flaw creates a situation of sudden discovery and reversal culminating in his death. Finally, it must provide catharsis - a cleansing experience by which the audience's sympathies with the hero allow them to experience and overcome their own pity and fear. Yanni points out that Shakespearian tragedies often follow this pattern. All the heroes and heroines are exceptional characters. A reversal of fortune is generally associated with a fatal flaw and a discovery of some sort (though Yanni does not point out that the order of discovery and reversal are not always the same; for example Hamlet's discoveries regarding his father's death lead to a reversal of his fortune while in Othello his discovery of Iago's treachery only comes after all his fortune's have been destroyed). Catharsis is assumed.

However, some of these links are somewhat tenuous, and may be criticized. Reversal of fortune is standard, of course, because the transition from life to death is part of the very definition of tragedy. However, that tragic flaw is occasionally a little uncertain, as in Romeo & Juliet, or too easily confused with virtue (as in Hamlet, where his 'flaw' is a hesitance to kill his uncle!). Additionally, as Mehl and Harbage point out, Shakespeare frequently deviates from a clear and logical step-by-step progression, dragging in elements of comedy and so forth that may make his works episodic at times.

On the other hand, there is a startling number of criteria discusses by Aristotle that Yanni never mentions, and which Shakespeare either fulfills or denies to some degree. For example, Aristotle suggests that the proper metre for drama is "The iambic... The proof is that in talking to each other we most often use iambic lines." (Aristotle) The majority of Shakespeare's tragedies, of course, use iambic lines. Likewise, Aristotle claims that "Necessarily then every tragedy has six constituent parts, and on these its quality depends. These are plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song." Shakespeare is well-known for his focus on diction, spectacle, and even song. In these categories one could make any number of parallels between Aristotle's dramatic suggestions and the original staged forms of Shakespeare's work. At the same time, Aristotle suggests that plot is more important to tragedy than is character. "They do not therefore act to represent character, but character-study is included for the sake of the action. It follows that the incidents and the plot are the end at which tragedy aims, and in everything the end aimed at is of prime importance. Moreover, you could not have a tragedy without action, but you can have one with out character-study." (Aristotle) In Shakespeare's tragedies, on the other hand, the exact opposite dynamic is seen. Meanwhile in Shakespeare it is the foilables of the characters, whether the madness of Hamlet and King Lear or the animal passions of Othello and cruel conning of Iago, which serve as the primary driving forces behind the plot. Character becomes more important than events.

Terrible chance and fate seem to Aristotle the highest sorts of plot devices, the best sort of element to drive the story forward, as seen in the tale of Oedipus Rex. "For in that way the incidents will cause more amazement than if they happened mechanically and accidentally, since the most amazing accidental occurrences are those which seem to have been providential." But for Shakespeare, that amazement is best reflected in the sort of terrifying incident that arises from human consciousness - character - which has gone awry. These two areas may partly explain why the sorts of tragic flaws seen in Shakespeare vary so much from the tragic flaws of Aristotelian theater. For the role of the tragic yet impersonal flaw, and the role of anonymous fortune, are both of primary value to Aristotle. To Shakespeare, they may either become subordinated in most cases to the deeply personal flaw (the inner madness) or to some external flaw (warring families), and fate itself plays a much reduced role.

Dieter Mehl, who also concerns himself with the traits of Shakespearian tragedy, is less concerned with how well it lines up with Aristotle's ideas and more about the actual innate messages of the plays. He speaks of the balance inherent in the works between an orderly sort of morality play with sinful tragic flaws and reasonable punishments, and a more ambiguous and dreadful meaningless and even fateless sort of doom. He writes that the best interpretations are: "aware of the intensity of doubt and bewilderment as well as the presence of moral order wanting to be realized..." (8)

Ignoring entirely issues of structural form, Mehl deals more with searching for themes that run through-out Shakespeare's tragedies. He concludes that "The only thing that seems to be, at first sight, really indispensable is a marked turn of fate, ending in the hero's destruction." (4) This is of course related to Aristotle's ideas of discovery and reversal, though many of the supporting elements may be changed. He also points out that "tragic guilt, catharsis and Christian redemption...are all aspects" (2) of Shakespeare's work. The Christianization of the tragic hero's downfall, tying it in to sin (as opposed to some less moral flaw) and creating a sort of morality play out of the tragedy is a common process in criticism. However, Mehl also explains that much of Shakespeare can only be understood by moving past this sort of religiousity and seeing that it "could not have been written in the ages of faith, but neither...in an age of unbelief or an age of reason." (5) Many plays, including Romeo and Juliet, seem to deal not with a superbly moral lesson, but with a frightening look at the arbitrary nature of the world. Others, such as Hamlet, which might appear to have a strong moral element dealing with a tragic flaw can also be seen in a sort of ambiguous light by which "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 is able to overcome." (8) Of course, Mehl also passingly points out that Romeo and Juliet's structure is such that it continually balances between tragedy and comedy until a great ways into the play, with many miscellaneous comic characters and so forth. One expects that this, too, would have irritated Aristotle's eye for a clean-cut tragedy. In essence, Mehl sees Shakespeare both as fulfilling traditional elements of the Aristotelian tragic models, and as moving beyond them into realms of necessary ambiguity.

Harbage agrees that Shakespeare can be interpreted as fulfilling Aristotelian models. However, even more than Mehl, Harbage tries to focus on the ways in which Shakespeare was not in debt to Aristotle. It is important to note where Harbage explains that Aristotle's works regarding tragedy were not widely read or distributed at that time. Keeping in mind that Shakespeare would not have been familiar with those "rules" might explain part of why he broke them so readily. He explains that while Shakespeare may have had certain elements in common with Aristotle's theater, Elizabethean theater in general "it adopted no formal conventions such as the chorus or the 'unities,' or even simplicity of design... As episodic as a History or as complicated as a Comedy. It was defined not by structure...but by its subject matter and informing spirit. It has to end in the meaningful death." (3) He proceeds to give a short history of the styles of Shakespeare's time, particularly delving into the tendency to strip death of its profundity and its link to morality. He speaks of Chaucer and the Monk's Tale, in which the victims (a little like Romeo and Juliet) are "morally blameless" (3) and of the way in which then-contemporary theater embraced morbidity "...easily understood, easily defensible against Philistine attacks...explosively adaptable to theater. At its best it converts Tragedy into a juridicial display of trespass, arrest, and execution; at its worst, into a spectacle of lust and bloodshed."

While Shakespeare himself, Harbage says, did not descend entirely into morbid schools of art, he was influenced by them. Deaths do occur in which the victim is blameless. The star-cross lovers are only one example. One could also argue that Hamlet had not directly sinner, though one can read his story as a moral complaint about passivity. However, Shakespeare is also influenced by the current religious trends regarding sacrifice and salvation, and all his deaths take on a kind of sublime meaning. Romeo and Juliet are "poor sacrifices" whose death heals their families. Religious imagery also surrounds the death of Hamlet, whose sacrifice clears the land of the blight of which he himself is a sign. In one of the essays chosen by Harbage, Charlton writes: As Charlton says, "In Shakespeare it is will, not fate, that creates inevitability. "tragedy becomes the stern, awful but exalting picture of mankind's heroic struggle towards a goodness..." (13) This picture is a sort of catharsis in itself, though often drawn from sources that Aristotle might have rejected. For Shakespeare also buys into the current moral ambiguity by portraying quite villainous heroes. King Lear, for example, is so defective of mind as to be quite unsound as an Aristotelian hero. This theater "is utilitarian but non-aristotelian, embracing what Aristotle has specifically rejected -- the idea of the protagonist as villain, and the psychological effect as dissuasion from crime."(5-6)

Harbage, like Mehl, discusses the way in which Shakespeare tends to be ambiguous and open-ended, morphing different styles and meaning together into a single body of work. Both discuss the way in which Shakespeare is "profoundly spiritual, and yet in no real sense is it at all religious." (Charlton, 14) He can be rightly interpreted by religious fundamentalist and secular humanists alike, and the essence of his tragedies is both Christian and Pagan, drawing on both redemption and a sort of existential unsurety. His works can be seen as following Aristotle's forms of tragedy and embracing the theories of the tragic flaw which brings the soul to a sudden humbling end, groveling poetically before the gods. They can also be read to deny that theory, and show the ways in which the flaws of others may corrupt the good of the otherwise flawless. His work can be viewed both as highly systematic, or as without form altogether.