Shakespearean Tragedy | Page 2

of Banquo 492
INDEX 494

INTRODUCTION
In these lectures I propose to consider the four principal tragedies of

Shakespeare from a single point of view. Nothing will be said of
Shakespeare's place in the history either of English literature or of the
drama in general. No attempt will be made to compare him with other
writers. I shall leave untouched, or merely glanced at, questions
regarding his life and character, the development of his genius and art,
the genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works.
Even what may be called, in a restricted sense, the 'poetry' of the four
tragedies--the beauties of style, diction, versification--I shall pass by in
silence. Our one object will be what, again in a restricted sense, may be
called dramatic appreciation; to increase our understanding and
enjoyment of these works as dramas; to learn to apprehend the action
and some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and
intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little
less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator. For
this end all those studies that were mentioned just now, of literary
history and the like, are useful and even in various degrees necessary.
But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary here, nor is any one of
them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the
plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of
reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of
Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.
Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to
study all the parts. They do not need, of course, to imagine
whereabouts the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to
use; but they want to realise fully and exactly the inner movements
which produced these words and no other, these deeds and no other, at
each particular moment. This, carried through a drama, is the right way
to read the dramatist Shakespeare; and the prime requisite here is
therefore a vivid and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly
suffice. It is necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole,
to compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from
this task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They
misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered
two things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis,
it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination aside
and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want of

practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic
perception difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these
dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and are
meant to be, nothing but means to an end. When they have finished
their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the
end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama
from which they set out, but a reading now enriched by the products of
analysis, and therefore far more adequate and enjoyable.
This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture, with
merely personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation. And
so, before coming to the first of the four tragedies, I propose to discuss
some preliminary matters which concern them all. Though each is
individual through and through, they have, in a sense, one and the same
substance; for in all of them Shakespeare represents the tragic aspect of
life, the tragic fact. They have, again, up to a certain point, a common
form or structure. This substance and this structure, which would be
found to distinguish them, for example, from Greek tragedies, may, to
diminish repetition, be considered once for all; and in considering them
we shall also be able to observe characteristic differences among the
four plays. And to this may be added the little that it seems necessary to
premise on the position of these dramas in Shakespeare's literary
career.
Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold
good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. But it will often apply to
these other works only in part, and to some of them more fully than to
others. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it is an
early work, and in some respects an immature one. _Richard III._ and
_Richard II._, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus
are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which Shakespeare
acknowledged in