Shakespearean Tragedy | Page 3

practice a certain obligation to follow his authority,
even when that authority offered him an undramatic material. Probably
he himself would have met some criticisms to which these plays are
open by appealing to their historical character, and by denying that
such works are to be judged by the standard of pure tragedy. In any

case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter of fact,
considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is said
of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications which
I shall often take for granted without mention. There remain Titus
Andronicus and Timon of Athens. The former I shall leave out of
account, because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did so
before he had either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic
conception. Timon stands on a different footing. Parts of it are
unquestionably Shakespeare's, and they will be referred to in one of the
later lectures. But much of the writing is evidently not his, and as it
seems probable that the conception and construction of the whole
tragedy should also be attributed to some other writer, I shall omit this
work too from our preliminary discussions.

LECTURE I
THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a
variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a
Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and
from the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and
another? Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as
represented by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in
this tragedy and now in that? And we are putting the same question
when we ask: What is Shakespeare's tragic conception, or conception
of tragedy?
These expressions, it should be observed, do not imply that
Shakespeare himself ever asked or answered such a question; that he
set himself to reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed a tragic
conception, and still less that, like Aristotle or Corneille, he had a
theory of the kind of poetry called tragedy. These things are all possible;
how far any one of them is probable we need not discuss; but none of
them is presupposed by the question we are going to consider. This
question implies only that, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare in writing

tragedy did represent a certain aspect of life in a certain way, and that
through examination of his writings we ought to be able, to some extent,
to describe this aspect and way in terms addressed to the understanding.
Such a description, so far as it is true and adequate, may, after these
explanations, be called indifferently an account of the substance of
Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of Shakespeare's conception of
tragedy or view of the tragic fact.
Two further warnings may be required. In the first place, we must
remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot
arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world
from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding
things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one
of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that
these poets at their best always look at things in one light; but Hamlet
and _Henry IV._ and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct
positions, and Shakespeare's whole dramatic view is not to be identified
with any one of these reflections. And, in the second place, I may
repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to be
content with his dramatic view, and are not to ask whether it
corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry--the
opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call
'Shakespeare the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he
was a very simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some
have maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we
can, that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished
convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his
dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.
1
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten
the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly
from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of
Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a
tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more
than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of