Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth

path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from th

ory of one person, the 'hero,'[1] or at most of two, the 'hero' and 'heroine.' Moreover, it is only in the love-tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The r

ense, a tragedy; and we no longer class Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes

lso, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease, po

ssential ingredient in tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by tragic pity, will nat

ant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from Chaucer. Chaucer's Monk's Tale is a series of what he calls 'tragedie

Cresus, the

nè myghte hym

noon oother

yngyng criè

Fortune alwey

ok the regnès t

steth hire, than

e brighte facè

y to common human sympathy and pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the playthi

with leaders in the state like Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in Romeo and Juliet, with members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a decided difference here between Othello and our three other tragedies, but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere priva

word or two

ate some service,

of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His fate affects the wel

are the very strongest of the emotions awakened by the early tragedy of Richard II., where they receive

he mortal tem

then coming and boring with a little pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their predomin

itiful in the

king of i

han compare with the effect of King Lear the effect of Tourgénief's pa