Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy

Irving Ribner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136568886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

First published in 1960. Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy is an exploration of man's relation to his universe and the way in which it seeks to postulate a moral order. Shakespeare's development is treated accordingly as a growth in moral vision. His movement from play to play is carefully explored, and in the treatment of each tragedy the emphasis is on the manner in which its central moral theme shapes the various elements of drama

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The following chapters will attempt to trace Shakespeare's development as a writer of tragedy from Titus Andronicus through Coriolanus. Many such attempts have been made, and it is part of Shakespeare's greatness that others will continue to be made, for Shakespeare's art is infinite in its variety and in the many dimensions it offers for critical examination. Any analysis of Shakespeare's achievement must be a partial one, a reflection of what the particular critic finds most significant and of what his own intellectual milieu has conditioned him to seek. Here Shakespeare's growth will be considered primarily in terms of the cognitive function of tragedy, its value as a way of knowing which, in its distinctive manner, postulates a moral order. This is but one of many possible approaches.

Tragedy is an exploration of man's relation to the forces of evil in the world. It seeks for answers to cosmic problems, much as religion seeks them, for it is a product of man's desire to believe in a purposive ordered universe.¹ I propose to treat Shakespeare's development as a growth in moral vision, to examine how Shakespeare, beginning at first with inherited dramatic forms and a conventional morality, learned to embody successive visions of human life in dramatic vehicles, each of which provides the emotional equivalent of an intellectual statement. This statement all of the elements of drama – action, character and poetry – are designed to support.

This is not to say that Shakespeare began each play with an abstract idea. He began probably with a dramatic situation, but it was one he chose because he saw implicit in it an idea with which he was concerned. This situation he analysed and explored, combined it with other situations from various sources, so that it could better express the idea whose germ within it he had initially perceived. As he shaped situation and idea, characters were envisaged to perform specific thematic functions. We are not concerned with Shakespeare's process of composition, if indeed we ever could determine it, but with the fusion of theme, action, character and language into a total unity which is the final aesthetic object.

Nor would I deny the realism of Shakespeare's art which so many critics have affirmed. Shakespeare's dramatic method combined a realistic technique with a symbolic one, for the greatest of art must attain a symbolic dimension.¹ So convincing is Shakespeare's realism that romantic critics often have been carried away by the illusion of reality in his characters and have neglected their symbolic functions within the total play. If idea implicit in character appears at times to be overstressed in the pages which follow, this is not to deny the illusion of reality. Medieval and Renaissance allegory always couched its symbolism in realistic terms, as Piers Plowman, The Faerie Queene or Pilgrim's Progress may illustrate.

Dramatic illusion requires that the audience accept the author's creations as fellow human beings for the duration of the play, and that what these characters do seems reasonable in terms of emotions which the audience can itself experience. In the art of such illusion Shakespeare was a master; it will not be my purpose to demonstrate what generations of commentators and theatre audiences have made obvious. What must be stressed is that this appearance is merely an illusion, maintained in part by the rapid movement of the action and by the willingness of the audience to believe. There need be no conflict between the demands of realism and symbol. It is, nevertheless, observable that as Shakespeare became more and more absorbed in the religious and ethical dimensions of tragedy he concentrated more and more on the development of symbol, with a corollary unconcern for character consistency. This becomes evident as we move from Hamlet to Othello, and it is particularly clear in the final Roman plays, where characters such as Cleopatra and Aufidius are rendered psychologically inconsistent by the conflicting symbolic functions which the total plan requires that they perform.

The theatrical tradition in which Shakespeare worked was different from the nineteenth-century naturalist theatre which has so profoundly affected the drama of our own time. A weakness of Bradley's work,¹ great and perceptive as it undoubtedly was, was that he read Shakespeare's tragedies in terms of such a naturalist stage. Bradley recognized the philosophical dimension of tragedy, and he sought for a moral order in Shakespeare's tragedies. If no such order emerges from his study, it may be largely because he sought for Shakespeare's thematic content not in the total complex of each play, but in the operations of dramatic character realistically appraised. Such analysis could lead only to unanswerable mystery, for stage creations analysed as though they were human beings could reflect only the mystery and seeming indirection of human life. Bradley could lead his readers only to a Shakespeare without positive belief, to a conception of tragedy merely as the posing of unanswerable questions, and to a moral system in the plays which is upon close analysis not moral at all.² Such a tragedy as Bradley found in Shakespeare could have been written only in the secular Renaissance of nineteenth-century historians, and not in the Renaissance which more recent scholarship has revealed to us.

The historical critics who succeeded Bradley¹ have taught us that drama is not life; it is an artificial construct controlled by the restrictions of the stage-audience relation, and in order for it to exist at all it must violate physical reality. A dramatic character is governed by the over-all design and purpose of the total play to which he contributes. Violations of physical and psychological reality may be the very means by which tragedy is rendered profound and moving, for by distorting reality to support the order and design he imposes upon the materials of life, the dramatist gives meaning to what in real life may be a haphazard and insignificant event.

There is a wide gulf between the naturalist drama of the nineteenth century and the conventional drama of the Elizabethans, with its continuity from the Middle Ages and its symbolic content. Drama is built out of individual character and event; the tragic hero must be a free, conscious agent, capable of deliberate moral choice. But the individual may also be a symbol of mankind, and the problem he faces may be that which all men face. Shakespeare's interest is in mankind more than in individuals. He endows his characters with a convincing illusion of reality, but through them he explores issues of wider significance than the psychological problems of any individual personality.

The chapters which follow assume the continuity of Shakespeare's theatre with that of the Middle Ages, that Shakespearian tragedy is marked by symbolic features more closely associated with medieval art than with modern. This does not mean that Shakespeare's tragedies are to be regarded as mere exempla designed to teach a medieval doctrine of de contemptu mundi, or that the pattern of de casibus legend is synonymous with that of Renaissance tragedy. The most significant result of medieval· studies in relation to Shakespeare² has been the renewed awareness they have given us that Elizabethan tragedy was the culmination of a popular dramatic tradition which has its roots securely in medieval life.

The Elizabethan stage was not primarily a realistic one. It was, as Francis Fergusson has written, ‘like older forms of Medieval art, popular, traditional and ritualistic’.¹ The continuity of tradition which links Shakespeare's theatre to its medieval forerunners reminds us that, like so many medieval art forms, the drama could be symbolic of life itself. The Globe theatre, with its starry firmament for a ceiling, the signs of the zodiac printed above its platform stage, was designed to represent the world, and figures who walked across its boards were often symbols of humanity in the large.

Medieval art was largely allegorical. Its impulse was didactic, and it relied upon specific symbol to depict universal truth. This was the method of Dante's Divine Comedy, which Fergusson has seen as the prototype of the drama of Western Europe. To effect its philosophical ends, Shakespeare's theatre used specific myths which had themselves evolved as symbols of human experience. In dealing with Shakespearian tragedy we must recognize the role which myth has served in man's unceasing endeavour to embody in specific symbolic terms the philosophical abstractions by which he lives. The medieval origins of Shakespearian tragedy reveal to us the inherent symbolism of Shakespeare's dramatic genre, and its capacity for philosophical statement.

Drama, more than any other art form, is dependent upon convention and tradition. The medieval heritage is important because many of the traditional complexes of character and event which comprise Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy were shaped in the Middle Ages as vehicles for peculiarly medieval views of life. This is not to say that Elizabethan tragedy is medieval, that the differences are not enormous. Dramatic forms themselves distinctly Elizabethan, however, may be developments from medieval archetypes, of which the morality play may serve as a significant example. We cannot adequately understand Elizabethan tragedy unless we understand both the artistic and the intellectual milieu out of which it grew and developed. But at the same time we must not underestimate the considerable evolution through which the drama had passed, with the leavening influence of classical tradition, before Shakespeare approached it.

Shakespeare has survived and is significant today because of certain qualities not confined by the limited perspective of the Elizabethan age or of any age. To understand his plays, however, we must recognize the wide divergences between the author's age and our own. The attempt to see Shakespeare in terms of his own time has been pursued in many directions. We have had voluminous studies of every aspect of Elizabethan England: its science and cosmology, its psychology and moral philosophy, its astronomy and theology, its political theory and political problems, its literary criticism. The application of such historical scholarship to Shakespeare's plays has been under constant attack in recent years¹ and many of the objections have been well founded. It has sometimes been forgotten that if Shakespeare were merely an ordinary Elizabethan we would be not much concerned with him today. The excesses of some critics, however, should not blind us to the basic truth that Shakespeare was a product of his age. We must begin with this premise, but we must remember also that the creative artist knows how to analyse, question and reinterpret the cultural milieu in which he lives. In his very analysis of traditional ideas the greatness of his achievement often lies. We must use the new knowledge which historical scholarship has given us, but we must not bury the creative mind in the commonplaces of the world out of which he grows.

The kind of historical criticism which has laid itself most open to attack has based its conclusions on limited data and unwarranted assumptions; thus it has been essentially unhistorical. In the realm of Elizabethan speculative ideas historical scholarship must tread with a particular wariness. There are very few intellectual concepts about which we can say with real certainty that there was an ‘Elizabethan view’. The Renaissance was an age of intellectual change and contradiction, with medieval and classical notions often in sharp conflict with one another. It is inevitable that there should have been such conflict, as there has been in every age, for a static idea of anything is a contradiction in terms. Ideas are always coming into being in opposition to older ideas or maintaining themselves in opposition to newer ones. In politics and religion there were heretical notions which censorship barred from print, but which we cannot doubt were much alive in men's minds. The creative artist chooses from among the great diversity of his age's ideas according to his own peculiar intellectual bent. The intellectual content of a Shakespearian tragedy, moreover, involves not the mere statement of ideas, Elizabethan or otherwise, but the exploration of ideas, examination both of ideas and their contraries in terms of human life. The play applies imaginative criteria to intellectual concepts. Out of this, if the dramatist is a great one, must emerge some affirmation which may be partly traditional or entirely new.

If it is doubtful that the obscure psychological treatises of Shakespeare's contemporaries will throw much light upon his plays, it is also true that there is a fundamental difference between a view of individual man derived from an erroneous conception of human physiology and a view of mankind based upon a cosmology which is philosophical rather than scientific, whose ultimate authority is in a view of God and not in the limited data of a still inadequate scientific method. This is why the great system of order and correspondences in the universe which is embodied in Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity can have a validity such as the pseudo-scientific treatises of a Timothy Bright can not. A knowledge of the ordered universe which Renaissance Christian humanism carried on from the Middle Ages¹ is essential to an understanding of Shakespeare's tragedies. Such a conception of the universe is not a universal ‘Elizabethan view’; we must recognize that it was being consistently challenged throughout Shakespeare's lifetime. But it is exactly the kind of view which tragedy, with its search for moral order, seeks to find, and a close reading of Shakespeare's plays – and not necessarily of the obscure treatises of his contemporaries – reveals that it was a view which Shakespeare deliberately espoused. Such a cosmology is rooted in the theological principles of the Anglican church, which it was Hooker's purpose to defend.

There is scepticism in Shakespeare's age, and there is constant exploration of traditional values, but there is also faith in a perfection rooted in divine purpose, and it is to this faith that Shakespearian tragedy directs its appeal. We need not ourselves accept Shakespeare's religious postulates in order to enjoy his plays. The only necessity is that they be believable and that the dramatist by the power of his art enable us to entertain their possibility. As we watch Macbeth, for instance, we assume with the author the possibility of human damnation, whether or not we so believe outside the theatre. We need not be Christians to appreciate Shakespeare, but we do need to share certain moral premises which have been the property of thinking men throughout history: the ethical prim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Senecan Beginnings: Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet
• 3. Historical Tragedy: King John, Richard II, Julius Caesar
• 4. The Pattern of Growth: Hamlet
• 5. The Pattern of Moral Choice: Othello
• 6. The Pattern of Regeneration: King Lear
• 7. The Operation of Evil: Timon of Athens and Macbeth
• 8. The Final Paradox: Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus
• Index