a note on the tragic flaw and causation in shakespearean tragedy

A NOTE ON THE TRAGIC FLAW AND CAUSATION IN SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDYAuthor(s): G. E. HauptSource: Interpretations, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1973), pp. 20-32Published by: Scriptorium PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23239812 .

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A NOTE ON THE TRAGIC FLAW AND CAUSATION IN SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

Every teacher of literature knows that the concepts of literary criticism can be a curse as well as a joy. On the one hand critical

concepts can encourage readers to apprehend and be articulate about

aspects of literature that they might not otherwise notice, but on the

other hand critical concepts may come between a reader and a work of

literature and distort apprehension. It is no surprise that in his short list

of the chief difficulties of criticism I. A. Richards included "general critical preconceptions."! i submit that the commonly used notion of

the tragic flaw (or Greek hamartia) is just such a general critical precon

ception: it, in my own teaching experience at least, produces critical

blindness more often than critical light. The irony of what I encounter

in teaching is that students invoke the authority of Aristotle's Poetics

for a reading of all tragedy as exhibiting the tragic flaw, when they do

not have the foggiest idea of what Aristotle really meant by the tragic flaw and never seriously consider the very real possibility that both

Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian notions of the tragic flaw—despite the

aura of authority the term has—may distort many, if not most, trage dies. Many students seem committed to the notion that every tragic hero must have something wrong with him, a flaw, because some old

Greek, Mr. Aristotle, said so and so has everybody else for centuries. I

hope in this brief note to clarify some of the problems concerning the

meaning and application of the concept. Even though I cannot achieve

certainty as to what precisely the term means and precisely how it

should be used in its Aristotelian sense, I think that I can achieve a

considerable degree of certainty as to what it does not mean and how it

should not be used.

Now, what Aristotle almost certainly did not mean by the tragic flaw is precisely that notion of the tragic flaw 1 encounter most fre

quently among my students. A composite account by a composite stu

dent runs as follows: The tragic flaw is something very bad in a tragic hero which causes a tragedy and makes the hero deserve what happens to him, even though the hero may have many desirable traits in addi

tion to his flaw.2 This may be called the sin-punishment concept of the

flaw (I shall hereafter refer to the tragic flaw as hamartia), and every translation of the Poetics I have looked at and every modern com

mentator I have read suggests that it is quite un-Aristotelian. A glance at the following translation of the relevant passage from the Poetics

prepared by Ingram Bywater for the authoritative Oxford edition of

Aristotle immediately shows how inadequate my composite student's

notion is:

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It follows, therefore, that there are three forms of Plot to

be avoided. (1) A good man must not be seen passing from

happiness to misery, or (2) a bad man from misery to

happiness. The first situation is not fear-inspiring or

piteous, but simply odious to us. The second is the most

untragic that can be; it has no one of the requisites of

Tragedy; it does not appeal either to the human feeling in

us, or to our pity, or to our fears. Nor, on the other hand,

should (3) an extremely bad man be seen falling from

happiness into misery. Such a story may arouse the human

feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity or fear;

pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves; so that there will be nothing either piteous or fear-inspiring in the situation. There re

mains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not

preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however,

is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some

[hamartia]. . ., of the number of those in the enjoyment of

great reputation and prosperity; e.g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and

the men of note of similar families. The perfect Plot,

accordingly, must have a single, and not (as some tell us) a

double issue; the change in the hero's fortunes must be not

from misery to happiness, but on the contrary from

happiness to misery; and the cause of it must lie not in any

depravity, but in some [hamartia].. .on his part; the man

himself being either such as we have described, or better, not worse, than that.3

In a sense Aristotle is trying to sit on a fence: he wants a tragic hero

who is neither very bad nor very good. Hamartia comes in to provide the fence to sit. on so that Aristotle can satisfy his concept of the

emotional effect of a tragic plot, his moral sense, and his feeling that

there must be necessity in tragic causation. For Aristotle a tragedy must

provoke the emotions of pity and fear, but a completely good man who

meets disaster is odious rather than pitiful or fear-provoking. Such a

disaster is too offensive to our moral sense of justice, it is implied.

However, the tragic hero must not meet with a disaster which he de

serves (there is no hint of "poetic justice" in Aristotle), for then there would be no pity. Thus the wicked man is ruled out as a tragic hero,

and we are left with the basically good man who has a hamartia which

provokes the undeserved misfortune, thus avoiding a gross violation of

our sense of justice, evoking pity and fear, and satisfying the require

ment of necessity. The Aristotelian universe is an ordered one, and

tragedy for him operates by cause and effect: the tragic hero does and

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is something which brings about his tragedy. Obviously, the composite view of my composite student is wrong in suggesting that hamartia is

something very bad and that the tragic hero in any sense deserves what

happens to him. To cite John Jones, "Nearly all professional Aristotelians have felt obliged. . .to exclude any strong implication of

moral fault or shortcoming."4 The composite student's view basically belongs to nineteenth-cen

tury Aristotelian scholarship, not to that (with a few exceptions) of the

twentieth century. It is possible that such a view arose because hamartia

in the Greek New Testament does mean "sin,"5 because of nineteenth

century hankerings after some form of poetic justice, and also because

of an attempt to square Aristotle with Shakespeare. The latter, as I shall

attempt to demonstrate later, is an irony of history in that the sin

punishment concept of hamartia (which has a right to be judged on its

own merits irrespective of its faithfulness to Aristotle) doesn't work

any better with Shakespeare than concepts closer to Aristotle. In any

event, the only thing Aristotelian about the composite student's view of

hamartia is that there is a necessary causal connection between what

the tragic hero is and what happens to him. And this, of course, is a

valuable insight into most tragedies.

Having disposed of what the late C.S. Lewis might have called the

"danger sense" of hamartia, that sense of the word we so often irre

sponsibly attribute to Aristotle, we may turn to three senses which the

majority of responsible modern students of Aristotle have attributed to

the word. I shall attempt to cite only the most recent studies.

1. Mistake or miscalculation. Among recent commentators, this

interpretation and translation is perhaps best represented by Gerald F.

Else, in his monumental Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument, and, with

qualifications, by O.B. Hardison, Jr., in Aristotle's Poetics: A Transla

tion and Commentary for Students of Literature.6 For Hardison,

hamartia is basically a failure of knowledge, a mistake, a miscalculation,

a missing of the mark (the latter being the literal or root sense of

hamartia). Thus hamartia is quite remote from any implication of

serious moral fault in his view.7 Hardison, however, cautiously and

silently avoids two criticisms that have been brought against the inter

pretation and translation of hamartia as a mistake or miscalculation (in

my opinion quite justifiably): 1) that it separates hamartia from the character or personality of the tragic hero and makes it something

external, even accidental, and 2) that it deprives hamartia of any ad

verse moral connotation.^ Hardison qualifies his view by saying that

hamartia "is a character trait" and that "in one sense it must be a moral

flaw," but he obviously leans in the direction of strongly underplaying the concept of the morally flawed character.9

A more narrow notion of hamartia as a mistake is that of Gerald

22



F. Else. In the light of Aristotle's well-recognized subordination of

hamartia to its role or function in the tragic plot, and in the light of his

stress on recognition of mistaken identities as a desirable feature of the

good tragic plot, Else conjectures that "hamartia would denote partic

ularly a mistake or error or ignorance as to. . .identity."10 In a some

what more extended but still restricted sense, "hamartia is an ignorance or mistake as to certain details."! 1 Thus he sums up in a way that quite

sharply excludes the moral element permitted in Hardison's more

elastic interpretation:

The correlation of hamartia and recognition as inter

dependent parts of the best tragic plot explains everything that Aristotle says about both of them. At the same time it

effectively disposes, ut mihi quidem videtur, of the 'moral

flaw' interpretation of hamartia.12

Insofar as I can judge without knowing Greek, I am inclined to agree with Grube and Whitman that the mistake theory in its extreme form is

inadequate because it disregards the fact that the context for the dis

cussion of hamartia in the Poetics is a moral one. I believe that the

mistake theory in order to survive needs the qualifications introduced

by Hardison.

2. Error of judgment. Hardison's qualified version of the mistake

interpretation actually brings it very much in line with this second view,

which sees hamartia as representing a failure within the character of the

hero expressed in the form of a wrong judgment. This interpretation is

favored by the majority of modern commentators.13 It is, for example, the view of one of the most distinguished Aristotelians of our century, the co-editor of the Oxford Aristotle, W. D. Ross.14 It is the view of

John Jones in his recent special study of Aristotle and Greek tragedy.15 The difficulty here is that unless this interpretation is qualified it runs

the risk of depriving the tragic hero of any moral weakness and attribu

ting to him a purely intellectual weakness. However, as S. H. Butcher

pointed out a long time ago, in Aristotelian thought intellectual weak

ness cannot be separated from moral weakness, an argument recently

appearing in Grube.16 With such an understanding, with such a qualifi

cation, the translation "error of judgment" would seem to make a wide

appeal to Aristotelians.

3. Moral error which is not serious enough to be wickedness or

sin. This is a view strongly supported in a recent study of Sophocles by Cedric Whitman of Harvard, who leans heavily on an important article

by P. W. Harsh.17 Whitman rejects both the idea that hamartia is a

serious moral error and that it is primarily an intellectual error or error

of judgment. He believes that hamartia alludes to a "minor moral flaw"

23



and that this is consistent with Aristotle's use of the word elsewhere. In

agreement with Whitman of Harvard is his colleague from the other

place, Bernard Knox, formerly of Yale.18

In the light of the strong scholarly support which senses 2 and 3

have received, I am inclined to think that Grube of Toronto is correct

in trying to bring them together. I promised no certainty as to what

hamartia means in this note, but I submit that Grube's summation is

sensible:

When commentators wonder whether hamartia means

either a moral weakness or an error of judgment, they are

reading into Aristotle a modern dichotomy between brains

and moral character which would seem unnatural to him.

The flaw is one of personality, and the human personality includes both moral character and the human mind. In

other words the flaw or weakness may be one of either

mind or morals. . . . The whole controversy as to whether

the hamartia is a moral flaw or an intellectual one is beside

the point. It can be either, or even both.19

Although my exploration of the three senses of hamartia in

modern Aristotelian scholarship may cause one to be somewhat

agnostic about knowing with certainty what the term really means, I

think it is safe to say that the range of meanings attributed to the term

by responsible Aristotelians is for the most part rather restricted by the

time they finish making qualifications, in contrast with the range of

meanings one may encounter among students attempting to interpret Aristotle.

My purpose here, despite this review of meanings of the term

hamartia, is not be a Greekless Aristotelian (a contradiction in terms).

Rather, it has been to clear the air before considering the value of the

concept of hamartia in interpreting Shakespearean tragedy. As I have

already more than intimated, I think the term is extremely dangerous

critically in interpreting Shakespeare. I shall suggest why in a moment, but I cannot leave the Greeks without saying that it is another one of

the ironies touched on in this note that students who speak with utter

confidence about the relevance of an Aristotelian hamartia to

Shakespeare might be shaken if they knew of or brooded about the fact

that some eminent students of Greek drama feel the concept doesn't

work very well with Greek tragedy. I will mention a few objections

among the classicists because they may stimulate thought about

Shakespeare and encourage a healthy scepticism about the use of the

term.

Perhaps the most famous and widely respected general study of

24



Greek tragedy is by H. D. F. Kitto, an English classicist.20 In the course

of his study he often suggests that hamartia won't really work with this

or that play, and indeed he feels that the concept doesn't apply at all to

any Aeschylean hero (with the doubtful exception of one).21 If we

think of Aeschylus' most famous play, the Agamemnon, in the light of

my preceding discussion, one reason is not far to seek. Agamemnon's hubris is too close to wickedness and sin to qualify as an Aristotelian

hamartia. (Indeed, the idea that hubris is the most common form of

hamartia is highly suspect.) In the study by Cedric H. Whitman,

Sophocles: A Study of Heroic Humanism, the thesis is advanced that

Aristotle's concept of hamartia is dictated by his own ethical require ments rather than by the nature of Greek tragedy. In Sophocles Whitman finds a celebration of humanistic values rather than moral

order (necessity with moral overtones); thus for him the Aristotelian

hamartia in its attempt to attribute some degree of moral error to the

tragic hero is a perversion of Sophocles: "It is a choice between

Aristotle's theory or Sophocles' plays."22 The Oedipus Rex of

Sophocles was apparently Aristotle's ideal tragedy in the Poetics, but

Bernard Knox, in a book-length study devoted exclusively to this play, is in accord with Whitman's general study of Sophocles in finding hamartia an inappropriate concept. Whitman's suggestion that hamartia

may distract attention from the celebration of the values of the tragic hero is useful to keep in mind in reading Shakespeare. Equally useful is

Knox's suggestion:

From this analysis of the relation between the hero's

character and the plot it results clearly that though the

hero's character is causal, its operation in the plot does not

fit tiie Aristotelian formula. For the actions of Oedipus which produce the catastrophe stem from all sides of his

character; no one particular action is more essential than

any other; they are all equally essential, and they involve

not any one trait of character which might be designated a

hamartia but the character of Oedipus as a whole.23

* * *

Turning finally to Shakespeare as seen from the point of view of

Aristotelian hamartia, 1 would like to pick up a few ideas thrown out

by Kitto, Knox, and Whitman, add some others, and reduce to a list as

a guide to my ensuing discussion what seem to me the principal dangers in applying Aristotelian hamartia to an analysis of Shakespearean tragic characterization and tragic causation. Possibly my list will apply to

writers other than Shakespeare.

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1. Sometimes the tragic protagonist is more deeply flawed than

Aristotelian hamartia would permit and indeed deserves what happens to him.

2. A character's contribution to his own tragedy may be through his total personality, his virtues as well as his flaws.

3. The flaws in the character of a tragic hero may be so deeply

integrated with his virtues that they cannot be separated from his

virtues except through violent abstraction.

4. Sometimes a virtue may be so twisted that it has the effect of

a vice or defect without being inherently a vice or defect.

5. Sometimes the emphasis is upon the imperfections of the

world rather than upon the hamartia in the hero as a cause of the

tragedy. 6. Sometimes more than one hamartia may be causal.

Obviously, in a short note I cannot review all of Shakespearean

tragedy from this point of view, particularly inasmuch as I would have

to define my position on at least some plays in relation to other critical

positions in order to be as cogent as I would like to be. But let me make

a few suggestive notes about some of the tragedies—less to prove my main point than to illustrate it. It certainly seems to me obvious that

Richard II, Richard III, and Macbeth afford clear examples of the

deeply flawed tragic hero, who is therefore quite un-Aristotelian. In

these plays the sin-punishment formula seems to work, and it can well

be argued that such a simple form of tragic causation somewhat limits

these tragedies as explorations of the human situation. I assume, of

course, without argument that our sense of life tends to exclude simple

tragic causation. Macbeth would be an example of a complication, be

cause in that play we are invited to see many admirable qualities in

Macbeth existing in a kind of psychic and ethical tension with his evil.

But still he dies because he does evil.

In Romeo and Juliet I see the first clear sign in Shakespearean

tragedy that Shakespeare is reaching towards a more complex concep tion of tragic causation than in the three plays already mentioned, the

first two earlier than Romeo and Juliet. What one might call the

"official" or strongly overt causation of the tragedy is announced in the

prologue, where the lovers are seen as "star-crossed," as victims of an

external fate which at the end of the play may be seen as providence.

However, the concrete, dramatic emphasis of the play is not upon an

impersonal fate as an external cause of the tragedy, but upon the

external obstacles of two feuding families who create a world inhospit

able to young love. But this complication in tragic causation is en

riched by the further suggestion in the play, particularly in the imagery

of light and speed, that the lovers contribute to their own downfall.

26



They are seen as too rash, and rashness is seen as dangerous, like

lightning or a flash of gunpowder. Is this rashness a hamartia? I think

not. The rashness of the lovers is an integral part of their intense roman

tic passion for each other, a part of the tradition of love at first sight. Without their rashness, their eager desire for the fulfillment of love, the

young lovers would not be as perfect in the very real human values they

embody. A hamartia cannot be isolated from the rest of their charac

ters, and, of course, if they never loved at all there would be no trag

edy. In considering the contribution of the lovers to their own tragedy we must see them in their totality, not as characters who have a flaw

that can be picked out.

Possibly Shakespeare was aware on a quite conscious level that he

was complicating his tragic causation. This is at least one possible way of explaining the philosophizing in the Friar's first speech. In the course

of the speech the Friar remarks on how creation and destruction are

paradoxically bound together in nature and on the further and related

paradoxes that evil can produce good and good can produce evil. He

expresses the latter paradox by saying, "Virtue itself turns vice, being

misapplied. . ." (2. 3. 21). It can be argued that somewhat paradoxi

cally the love of Romeo and Juliet, which is a supreme value, a virtue, becomes destructive in the play because of the rashness which is one of

its defining characteristics. In any event, even though the rashness of

Romeo and Juliet could be considered an error of judgment and thus a

hamartia, it is very clear that Shakespeare is strongly insisting on other

facts as well in the tragic causation (fate, the feud), and it also seems

clear, to me at least, that isolating a hamartia from the totality of Romeo and Juliet oversimplifies their own contribution to the tragedy.

Although other Shakespeareans may differ with me about some points,

certainly Shakespeare is reaching toward a more complex projection of

tragic causation than is expressed in his earlier tragedies or in the theory of hamartia (which, incidentally, he probably did not know about).

The kind of complex interaction of virtue and vice hinted at in

the line from the Friar's speech seems to me clearly evident in two

closely related plays, Julius Caesar and Othello. In both Brutus and

Othello we find characters who are supremely noble but whose nobility has within itself, as part of its nature, a weakness.24 Both are naive

about reality, both are duped. Cassius works upon Brutus' sense of

nobility and public responsibility to make him kill Caesar even though he knows no personal or concrete reason for doing so. Iago works upon Othello's sense of honor to make him kill what he loves most, Desdemona. Neither Brutus nor Othello is a match for the machinations

of the evildoers in our world, and the tragic causation hinges upon a

combination of the world's evil and a kind of excellence which is in

herently vulnerable rather than flawed by a separable hamartia. An

27



alternative to the notion of a separable hamartia as a factor in

Shakespearean tragedy has been well put by the late A. P. Rossiter:

Not only is the vulnerability to fortune of human distinc

tion Shakespeare's theme: its special liability to intense

suffering and destruction. He also emphasizes the pre cariousness of its very quality of greatness: of its right to

regard, respect, admiration, awe.25

Rossiter's target is A. C. Bradley's conception of Shakespearean trag

edy, but it can be seen that his remarks also apply to Aristotelian or

pseudo-Aristotelian flaw-picking. What Rossiter is basically doing, from a historical point of view, is pushing Shakespearean tragedy away from

any kind of theory centered around flaws as causative agents and in the

direction of medieval de casibus tragedy, which in its purest form in

sisted upon the fall of great men as the tragic fact without looking for

causation in what they themselves had done.26 This kind of tragedy

did, however, in stressing the fall of great men provide the basis for a

type of tragedy in which the causal factor within character in a tragedy is not a defect but a certain kind of precarious excellence.

I think this type of tragedy is to be found in its starkest clarity in

Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. I know many people are taught that Antony falls because of poor judgment, a hamartia, and Coriolanus

because of pride, another hamartia, if too grievous to be Aristotelian.

However, as the work of both Willard Farnham and Eugene Waith

seems to suggest, in Antony poor judgment is integrated with a kind of

bountiful greatness of spirit, and in Coriolanus a rigid pride is part of a

heroic greatness which contemns any compromise with the practical

aspects of life.27 Make Antony and Coriolanus more practical, more

adaptable, and they are lesser men; their particular excellence is quali fied. One must see Antony and Coriolanus as falling because of the

totality of their personalities and because of a type of excellence which

cannot function well within the limits of the practical reality in which they must live. I feel that this is a deeper and more meaningful vision of

life than one which suggests that people break their necks because of a

particular mistake, error of judgment, or moral inadequacy.

What, then, of Hamlet and King Lear, those greatest of

Shakespearean tragedies? Does Hamlet meet with disaster because he

thinks too much, because he procrastinates, because he has an Oedipus

complex, because he's too sensitive, because he can't make up his mind,

etc., etc.? Or is Hamlet's failure to carry out the ghost's injunction in

the least destructive manner the result of his total personality, his

mingled virtues and weaknesses, his integrity of spirit as well as his

possible weakness of spirit? I think the latter, and I also think that the

28



so-called "tragic burden," the heavy weight of what has been imposed

upon Hamlet in terms of duty and a suddenly expanded awareness of

the world's evil, is another important factor in causing the tragic out

come of the play. To flaw-hunt is to oversimplify a complex play. The temptation to flaw-hunt is perhaps greater with King Lear.

After all, Lear is shown early in the play as setting the action in motion

with an act expressing an extreme lack of self-knowledge and its cor

relative, knowledge of other people. In the first place, this is not an

Aristotelian hamartia, for, as Kent points out, Lear does evil when he

banishes Cordelia. In the second place, the action of the tragedy is

strongly motivated by the more completely evil characters, Edmund,

Goneril, and Regan. And in the third place, we tend to forget Lear's

initial misdeed as we witness a world convulsed by evil with little inti mation of a redeeming providence. Flaw-picking is a reductive way of

looking at the play, although no one could possibly deny that Lear is in

some sense flawed and that his flaw precipitates the action of the play.

Throughout this brief discussion I have tried to keep in mind the

possible Aristotelian sense or senses of hamartia, but I think it is

obvious that my composite student's nineteenth-century conception of

hamartia will not do either. Do Romeo and Juliet deserve what happens to them? Does Antony? Does Lear? Does Hamlet? I think not. Shake

speare's sense of reality is too strong for him to write within the frame

of a simple sin-punishment formula except in those tragedies which are

among the most shallow, Richard II and Richard III. Macbeth, as I have

already intimated, is a somewhat different case, for it gains a sense of

tragic complexity because of the tensions between the good and the

bad in Macbeth's character and, I would add, because Macbeth's tragic

disaster is in part a psychological disaster, the psychic self-inflicted

wound of doing evil and thus violating those components of his human

nature which are good. Before his death he has died as a man.

My abbreviated remarks about Aristotle in this note might make

an Aristotelian shudder. My necessarily abbreviated remarks about

Shakespearean tragedy certainly make me shudder, particularly since

my whole point is that the complexity of tragic causation in most

Shakespearean tragedy is valuable and may be distorted by the reader

who goes poking around looking for some flaw he can isolate from a

tragedy which mirrors the complexity of life. I do not say, Let's throw

out the idea of the tragic flaw altogether, but I do say, HANDLE WITH CARE.

Hopefully, in my brief comments on plays and in my list of the

dangers of flaw-picking I have done enough to suggest why the tragic flaw is a dangerous idea, which is all I can reasonably do in a short

space. Perhaps I have said enough to suggest how a critical concept like

the tragic flaw can blind us to a literary reality which does indeed

29



dazzle. And perhaps I have said enough to come full circle and return to

I. A. Richards' general warning about "general critical preconceptions" and conclude with a brief quotation from Practical Criticism:

Finally, general critical preconceptions (prior demands made

upon poetry as a result of theories—conscious or unconscious—

about its nature and value), intervene endlessly, as the history of

criticism shows only too well, between the reader and the poem. Like an unlucky dietetic formula- they may cut him off from

what he is starving for, even when it is at his very lips.2 8

G. E. Haupt Associate Professor of

English Memphis State University

30



FOOTNOTES

'i. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, n.d.), p. 15.

My composite student is not alone. His view appears in Robert B. Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in "King Lear" (1948; rpt. Seattle: Uni

versity of Washington Press, 1963), pp. 30-38. With Aristotle hovering in the

background, he attributes moral flaws not only to Lear but also to Kent, Edgar, and Cordelia. As a result, his concept of the tragic action of the play is morally more tidy than many readers would find acceptable.

^Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random

House, 1941), pp. 1466-67. For By water's translation of the word hamartia I have substituted the transliterated Greek word in order to prevent the translation from

defining the meaning of the word. One of the obvious difficulties in using transla tions is that the translation is in itself an act of interpretation.

^John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (1962; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 15.

-*L. J. Potts, Aristotle on the Art of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer

sity Press, 1953), p. 81.

^Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1967), pp. 375-99; Leon Golden and O.B. Hardison, Jr., Aris totle's Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature (Engle wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 176-86.

^Golden and Hardison, p. 183.

^G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 79; Cedric H. Whitman, Sophocles: A Study of Heroic Humanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 33.

^Golden and Hardison, p. 183.

10Else, p. 379.

11 Else, p. 383.

12Else, p. 385.

13Else, p. 378.

l^W. D. Ross, Aristotle: A Complete Exposition of His Works & Thought, 5th ed. (1953; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 277-78 and 312.

31



^Jones, p. 15. Jones further elaborates the thesis that the very concept of the tragic hero is alien to Aristotle, but I have not touched on this problem in this note and have assumed with all the other Aristotelians 1 have read that Aristotle does have some concept of what can be called a "tragic hero."

16S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th ed. (1907; rpt. New York: Dover, 1951), p. 321; Grube, pp. 79-80.

^Whitman, pp. 32-41; Philip W. Harsh, "Hamartia Again," Transactions of the American Philological Association, 76 (1945), 47-58. I have transliterated Harsh's Greek in the title of his article.

^Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 30 and 203.

l^Grube, pp. 79-80.

D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study, 2nd ed. (1950; rpt. New York: Anchor, n.d.).

2lKitto, p. 117.

^Whitman, p. 36.

"Knox, p. 31. I might add that the distinguished translator and co-editor of the Chicago translation of the Greek tragedies believes that no Greek tragedy really fits the Aristotelian concept of hamartia. See his whole discussion in Story Patterns in Greek Tragedy (1964; rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 18-22.

^I am not unaware that influential critics like T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and D. A. Traversi have seen Othello as most deeply flawed. I simply do not agree that this is the intent of the play.

25A. P. Rossiter, "Shakespearean Tragedy," Angel with Horns and Other

Shakespeare Lectures (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), p. 266. See also the discussion of hamartia and A. C. Bradley in Peter Alexander, Hamlet: Father and Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 40-114.

2^See Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (1936; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963). Farnham points out that de casibus tragedy was soon modified by a tragic defect in the character of the tragic protagonist, thus modifying the stricter emphasis upon the haphazard nature of our world as ruled by Fortune.

■^Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier: The World of His Final

Tragedies (1950; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963). Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). It is Farnham's thesis that in the late tragedies of Shakespeare, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon, and Coriolanus, there is a special preoccupation with tragic protagonists who are an intricate mixture of virtues and defects. It is Waith's thesis that in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus Shakespeare is concerned with a type of hero with classical antecedents, called Herculean by Waith, whose virtues and defects are fused in a special heroic excellence. I am grateful to Professor Waith's graduate seminar in Shakespeare at Yale University for first

stimulating a long time ago some of the thoughts appearing in the present note.

^Richards, p. 15.

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a note on the tragic flaw and causation in shakespearean tragedy

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