Shakespearean Tragedy | Page 6

or in character issuing in action.
Shakespeare's main interest lay here. To say that it lay in mere
character, or was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake, for
he was dramatic to the tips of his fingers. It is possible to find places
where he has given a certain indulgence to his love of poetry, and even
to his turn for general reflections; but it would be very difficult, and in
his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect passages where he has
allowed such freedom to the interest in character apart from action. But
for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of mere 'plot' (which is a
very different thing from the tragic 'action'), for the kind of interest
which predominates in a novel like The Woman in White, it is clear that
he cared even less. I do not mean that this interest is absent from his
dramas; but it is subordinate to others, and is so interwoven with them
that we are rarely conscious of it apart, and rarely feel in any great
strength the half-intellectual, half-nervous excitement of following an
ingenious complication. What we do feel strongly, as a tragedy
advances to its close, is that the calamities and catastrophe follow
inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main source of these
deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare, 'character is
destiny' is no doubt an exaggeration, and one that may mislead (for
many of his tragic personages, if they had not met with peculiar
circumstances, would have escaped a tragic end, and might even have
lived fairly untroubled lives); but it is the exaggeration of a vital truth.
This truth, with some of its qualifications, will appear more clearly if
we now go on to ask what elements are to be found in the 'story' or
'action,' occasionally or frequently, beside the characteristic deeds, and
the sufferings and circumstances, of the persons. I will refer to three of
these additional factors.
(_a_) Shakespeare, occasionally and for reasons which need not be
discussed here, represents abnormal conditions of mind; insanity, for

example, somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these
are certainly not what we called deeds in the fullest sense, deeds
expressive of character. No; but these abnormal conditions are never
introduced as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady
Macbeth's sleep-walking has no influence whatever on the events that
follow it. Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in
the air: he saw the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan.
Lear's insanity is not the cause of a tragic conflict any more than
Ophelia's; it is, like Ophelia's, the result of a conflict; and in both cases
the effect is mainly pathetic. If Lear were really mad when he divided
his kingdom, if Hamlet were really mad at any time in the story, they
would cease to be tragic characters.
(_b_) Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his
tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural
knowledge. This supernatural element certainly cannot in most cases, if
in any, be explained away as an illusion in the mind of one of the
characters. And further, it does contribute to the action, and is in more
than one instance an indispensable part of it: so that to describe human
character, with circumstances, as always the sole motive force in this
action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always placed in
the closest relation with character. It gives a confirmation and a distinct
form to inward movements already present and exerting an influence;
to the sense of failure in Brutus, to the stifled workings of conscience in
Richard, to the half-formed thought or the horrified memory of guilt in
Macbeth, to suspicion in Hamlet. Moreover, its influence is never of a
compulsive kind. It forms no more than an element, however important,
in the problem which the hero has to face; and we are never allowed to
feel that it has removed his capacity or responsibility for dealing with
this problem. So far indeed are we from feeling this, that many readers
run to the opposite extreme, and openly or privately regard the
supernatural as having nothing to do with the real interest of the play.
(_c_) Shakespeare, lastly, in most of his tragedies allows to 'chance' or
'accident' an appreciable influence at some point in the action. Chance
or accident here will be found, I think, to mean any occurrence (not
supernatural, of course) which enters the dramatic sequence neither

from the agency of a character, nor from the obvious surrounding
circumstances.[3] It may be called an accident, in this sense, that
Romeo never got the Friar's message about the potion, and that Juliet
did not awake from her long sleep a