colin burrow, “what is a shakespearean tragedy” (2013)

Cambridge Companions Onlinehttp://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/companions/

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean TragedyEdited by Claire McEachern

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747Online ISBN: 9781139095747

Hardback ISBN: 9781107019775Paperback ISBN: 9781107643321

Chapter1 - What is a Shakespearean tragedy? pp. 1-22

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139095747.003Cambridge University Press

chapter 1

What is a Shakespearean tragedy?Colin Burrow

Aristotle (384322 bc) dened tragedy as a mimsis of a high, completeaction . . . in speech pleasurably enhanced . . . in dramatic, not narrativeform, effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions.1

Aristotle was explicating and evaluating tragedies written in fth-centuryAthens by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, all of whom were deadbefore he was born, and whose work he was attempting to assimilate into hisown systematic philosophy. That philosophy encompassed rhetoric andethics as well as biological theory. Aristotles range of intellectual interestsboth enriches and confuses his denition of tragedy. Scholars have fretted inparticular over what Aristotle meant by catharsis. Did he believe thattragedy purges excessive emotions in the way that medicines could purgeexcessive humours from the body? Did he think of tragedy as providing akind of emotional education, which might help an audience learn how toexperience the right kinds of emotion on appropriate occasions?2 Which ofthose aims Aristotle wished to foreground is anybodys guess. Whether anyof his concerns were actually on the minds of the fth-century tragediansabout whom Aristotle principally writes is extremely doubtful.

There are two clear lessons here. Denitions of tragedy necessarily comeafter the fact, and are usually embedded in larger philosophical systems. As aresult they tend to be messier and less widely applicable than they sound.Nonetheless, theoretical writing about tragedy has had a massive inuenceon the ways in which Shakespearean tragedy is read, understood and evenperformed. Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) by A. C. Bradley (18511935),perhaps now more often criticized than read, is the most inuential singlebook on this subject. Bradleys view of Shakespearean tragedy was deeplyinuenced by Aristotle, on whose Metaphysics Bradley wrote an essay earlyin his career, but his adaptation of Aristotles theory to suit Shakespeareis often awkward. Bradley argues that a fatal imperfection or error3 inthe character of the hero is the driver of Shakespearean tragedy. This isan Edwardian simplication of Aristotles Poetics, which argues that the

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Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2014

high-born and virtuous characters who are the principal subject of tragedyshould, in a perfect example of the genre such as Oedipus Rex, suffer as aresult of some hamartia (Poetics, ch. 13, 1453a). By hamartia Aristotleprobably meant not an ethical weakness or a aw in character but aparticular kind of acting in ignorance, when a protagonist unwittinglydoes something which under its proper description he would know to bewrong. This happens when Oedipus inadvertently kills his father at acrossroads.4 In the Christian era hamartia was often rendered simply assin, and became associated with both the general weakness of fallen beingsand the specic vices of particular agents. Bradley is heir to that trans-formation of terms and of ethical values, and his heirs in turn producedfrom his work the cod-moralizing belief that Shakespearean tragic heroesdisplay a tragic aw (Bradley himself never uses this phrase) which ispunished in the course of the play. That is a recipe for drama which couldonly appeal to those who want simply to see the bad bleed, and who have aclear idea of what bad is. It is not the recipe by which Shakespeareantragedy was created, and does not even correspond very closely to whatBradley himself said about Shakespearean tragedy.

Bradley was not just a student of Aristotle. He worked with the idealistphilosopher T.H. Green at Oxford, and spent a period in Germany. Hisbrother, the philosopher F.H. Bradley (18461924), was one of the leadingEnglish followers of the German Romantic philosopher G.W. F. Hegel(17701831). Bradley himself was the most inuential English popularizer ofHegels theory of tragedy. For Hegel tragedy was the highest form of literaryart, which dramatized and then resolved conicts in the ethical sphere. So inSophocless Antigone (which is Hegels exemplary tragedy) loyalty to thefamily prompts the heroine to bury her brothers, while King Creonsallegiance to the state leads him to have the bodies of rebels exposed tothe air. In the tragic climax there is for Hegel a resolution of those distinctethical perspectives, in which each is reabsorbed into a higher totality.Tragedy could therefore act as an engine of development in ethical thinking,which for Hegel, as for his follower Marx, evolves through a dialecticbetween two interconnected but opposing elements. Hegel regardedShakespearean tragedy as a product of a late and subjective stage of ethicalthought, in which conicts and their resolution were internal to its heroesrather than objectively embodied in different agents. The result is heroeslike Hamlet who vacillate.5 Bradleys focus on heroes who are torn by aninward struggle marks him as a popularizer of Hegel as well as of Aristotle.6

It would be nave to suppose that to understand the real character ofShakespearean tragedy we should try simply to forget this critical tradition.

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The idea that there is something called Shakespearean tragedy which hasits own rationale and which offers unique insights into the world and intothe conicts that shape and misshape the lives of human beings is the reasonthis book is called The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy.However, it is tempting to try, by way of a thought-experiment, to set asidethe theoretical arguments which developed after Shakespeares death, andinitially ask not what is a Shakespearean tragedy? but a rather different,historical question: what was a Shakespearean tragedy so far as Shakespeareand his contemporaries were concerned?As we shall see, this question is noteasy to answer, but asking it can alert us to many elements withinShakespeares tragedies which did not matter much to Bradley but whichprobably did matter to Shakespeare and his audiences.

What might one of Shakespeares contemporaries have thought whilewatching Hamlet, and what could it tell us? Perhaps not much. Theresponses of seventeenth-century theatregoers to Shakespeares plays wereprobably not much more interesting than the average remark overheard inthe foyer during the interval of a theatrical performance today.We do have afew records of such thoughts, and they are not on the whole inspiring.When the diarist Samuel Pepys (16331703) saw a production of Hamlet in1663 the main thing that struck him was not the princes psychologicalirresolution, but the fact that his wifes maid was onstage in a non-speakingrole. He loyally noted that she becomes the stage very well. Pepys certainlybelieved Shakespearean tragedy mattered: he devoted an afternoon a yearlater to learning To bee or not to bee without book,7 but when he sawOthello in 1660 he just described it as well done and remarked that a verypretty lady that sot byme cried to see Desdimona smothered.8Had the ladyin question not been pretty its unlikely that Pepys would have noticed hertragic reaction. In the 1640s Abraham Wright (161190) was similarlycavalier, describing Hamlet as but an indifferent play, the lines butmeane: and in nothing like Othello, though he did enjoy the gravediggerscene.9 Simon Forman, however, left a more revealing record of a perform-ance of Macbeth on 20 April 1610:

The next night, beinge at supper with his noble men whom he had to bid to afeaste to the which also Banco should have com, he began to speake of NobleBanco, and to wish that he wer ther. And as he thus did, standing up todrincke a Carouse to him, the ghoste of Banco came and sate down in hischeier behind him. And he turninge About to sit down Again sawe the gosteof Banco, which fronted him so, that he fell into a great passion of fear andfury, Utteringe many wordes about his murder, by which, when they hardthat Banco was Murdred they Suspected Makbet. Then MackDove ed to

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England to the kinges sonn, And soe they Raised an Army, And cam intoScotland, and at Dunston Anyse overthrue Mackbet. In the meantymewhille Macdovee was in England, Makbet sleweMackdoves wife & children,and after in the battelle Mackdove slewe Makbet. Observe Also howMackbetes quen did Rise in the night in her slepe, & walke and talked andconfessed all, & the docter noted her wordes.10

Forman mainly records what we call plot rather than describing the emo-tions of the characters onstage or their effect on the audience. Nonetheless,he clearly brought notions of suspicion and guilt to his experience oftragedy: he thought about what the doctor infers from Lady Macbethsmadness and what the diners at the banquet scene think ofMacbeth aboutwhich there is very little evidence in the surviving text of the play. Thiscould well indicate that educated members of Elizabethan and Jacobeanaudiences responded to plays in general and to tragedies in particular bythinking about how and what characters onstage knew. The processes ofinference and conjecture that operated in Elizabethan courts of law, inwhich jurors would make conjectures about the conduct and motives ofindividuals, does seem to have inuenced the ways plays were written andperhaps also how they were experienced.11 That is a kind of psychologicalresponse to tragedy, although it differs profoundly from Bradleys concep-tion of psychology because it concentrates more on cognitive than emo-tional questions. Forman asks himself not what is Macbeth feeling now?but who knows what about whom on the stage?. That question may havebeen one which Shakespeare wanted his audience to ask, since it hassuggestive parallels with Hamlets attempt to use the play called TheMousetrap to probe Claudiuss guilt: guilty creatures sitting at a play / . . .have proclaimed their malefactions (2.2.5425). Shakespearean tragediesafter Bradley were often treated as dramas of emotion; for Elizabethans theymay have been at least in part dramas of knowledge.

Northumberland in 2 Henry IV describes a messenger entering to bringthe news that Hotspur his son is dead: Yea, this mans brow, like to a title-leaf, / Foretells the nature of a tragic volume (1.1.601). Can we learnanything further about what Shakespearean tragedy was by looking at theway tragedies were presented to their early readers? The picture here is againcomplex. Of the thirty-ve plays listed in the contents page of the 1623 FirstFolio edition of Shakespeares dramatic works eleven fall under the sectionheaded Tragedies. Curiously enough only three of these are actually calledtragedies in the printed list (The Tragedy of Coriolanus, The Tragedy ofMacbeth and The Tragedy of Hamlet), while others are presented as justplain Romeo and Juliet or Cymbeline King of Britain. Several of the plays

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given these bald titles in the preliminaries, including Titus Andronicus andKing Lear, are described as tragedies on the running-titles at the top of eachpage of the play itself. Even here there seems to be little rhyme or reason tothe titles: Timon of Athens is grouped with the tragedies, but remains justTimon of Athens even on the running-titles, except at the very start of theplay when its called The Life of Tymon of Athens. The folio is a far fromperfect guide to anything that went on in Shakespeares head, since it waspublished seven years after his death. It includes among the tragedies oneplay, which it variously calls Cymbeline King of Britain and The Tragedie ofCymbeline, which tends now to be described as a romance or a tragicom-edy. Troilus and Cressida (to which it is notoriously hard to assign a genre)sits anomalously at the end of the Histories and before the start of theTragedies section of the folio, as though it doesnt quite belong with eithergroup. This was probably a result of disputes over the copyright for the playrather than a sign that a scrupulous printer worried about its genre, butthere are good reasons to believe that even the publishers who wereattempting to produce a volume called Mr William Shakespeares ComediesHistories & Tragedies did not feel secure about the generic boundariesbetween tragedies and other plays. In the smaller and cheaper quarto formateditions in which a number of Shakespeares plays were published duringhis lifetime several plays classed as histories in the First Folio were rstcalled tragedies, notably The Tragedie of King Richard the Second (printedin 1597) and The Tragedy of King Richard the third (also printed in 1597).Meanwhile two plays that Bradley included among the big four tragedieshave in their quarto texts titles that make them sound as much likehistories (a word which can in this period mean little more than storyor narrative) as tragedies: The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince ofDenmark (1603) is at least tragicall, but the True Chronicle History of theLife and Death of King Lear and his three Daughters (1608) sounds like ahistory play.

So a plays title leafmight foretell the nature of the tragic volume.Or itmightnot. The evidence of title pages suggests that the category tragedy was veryelastic in this period. That is of course borne out by the extraordinary uencywith which Shakespeare modulates between chronicle history, tragedy andmoments of comedy throughout his oeuvre. Shakespeare himself used thewords tragedy and tragic in different ways at different times. In the historyplays those words are generally used to heighten moments of fear, as whenNorthumberland anticipates the worst from the frowning messenger. By thevery end of the sixteenth century, however, Shakespeare was tending to restrictthe word tragical to contexts in which characters are rather stiltedly attempting




to raise their language beyond its normal social register, or which are actuallycomic. In A Midsummer Nights Dream (c. 1596) the rude mechanicals play ofPyramus and Thisbe is described as very tragical mirth (5.1.57). By the later1590s tragical seems to have dropped from Shakespeares vocabulary entirely,with the telling exception of its use by the arch-pedant Polonius in Hamlet(c. 1600) when he describes the players who come to Elsinore as The best actorsin the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, sceneindividable or poem unlimited (2.2.3636). Polonius once played JuliusCaesar, and his vocabulary here marks him as being at least a decade out ofdate in both his tastes and his critical language. Printers continued to use theword tragical on title pages well into the seventeenth century, but forShakespeare himself that word seems to have evoked the literary landscape ofthe 1560s and 1570s in which the source for Romeo and Juliet was called TheTragical History of Romeus and Juliet. For him tragical came to connoteunrelenting woe, and a slightly outmoded literary manner.

These arent just lexical curiosities. The slippage between plays calledhistories and plays called tragedies indicates the extent to which readers,printers and Shakespeare himself identied tragedy with the fall of historicalgures (particularly kings and Caesars) who were crushed by the grindingrotations of fortunes wheel. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 13401400) gatheredtogether tragedies of this kind (as well as several which dont quite tthat model) in the Monks Tale, and seems to have been the rst Englishwriter call this kind of story a tragedy. The Fall of Princes by Chaucersfollower John Lydgate (c. 13701449/50?) developed Chaucerian tragedyinto a form which could sharply address Lydgates own Lancastrian politicalcontext.12 The appetite for tragedies about the fall of princes, modelledloosely on Lydgate and on Boccaccio, remained unquenched through thesixteenth century. In A Mirror For Magistrates, which grew in regulareditions from 1559 through to the next century, the ghosts of historicalcharacters end their tales with warnings along the lines of Who recklesrules, right soone may hap to rue.13 This vernacular model of tragedyestablished both a general moral framework for Elizabethan tragedy and acrude boundary to the social origins of people whose lives could be describedas a tragedy. A play called The Tragedy of Bottom the Weaver would beintrinsically comical, since a weaver is so clearly, even in his name, close to thebottom of the social ladder. Falling requires a measure of social elevation.Being part of a historical record implies a degree of prominence too.

But the most important single fact to bear in mind when thinking aboutany aspect of Shakespeare, or indeed about his contemporary dramatists, is

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that he worked in a relatively new and rapidly changing medium under ahigh degree of commercial pressure. If he did not do something new in eachplay then his audience would take their pennies down the road to the Swanor the Rose or one of the other rival playhouses. In this environment the fallof princes was one of several tragic conventions which were not passivelyfollowed but continually transformed. Shakespeare did indeed write playsabout the fall of kings and (Julius) Caesars, but the way he did so was usuallyslightly offbeat. Richard II (printed 1597) concentrates with operatic inten-sity on the fall of a king and the rhetorical arias with which he washes awayhis own balm.Most of the central characters of later tragedies tend to be justslightly out of place, or not quite as socially elevated as they want to think ofthemselves, or are even men on the make. Macbeth is not a king but awould-be king, whose desire to get on is accelerated by the prophecies of thewitches. Hamlet is a prince who has lost the prospect of succession. Othellois a mercenary warrior whose own conception of his status is qualied byboth his and the Venetians sense that his blackness makes him not quitebelong. Even Coriolanus is an aristocratic anachronism in a period ofRomes history in which power is shifting towards the plebeians, whileAntony is left behind by the realpolitik of the rising emperor Octavian.When Shakespeare returned to a fall of princes narrative in King Lear(c. 16036) he again did something odd with it: Lear wilfully divides hiskingdom right at the start of the play as though he is determined to spinFortunes wheel right off its axle by his own efforts, while the Gloucestersub-plot relates the rise and fall of another socially marginal and aspiringcharacter, Edmund. This preoccupation with upward social mobility sug-gests how profoundly the plays of Shakespeares contemporary ChristopherMarlowe (156493) inuenced his way of writing tragedies. Marlowe whodied just as Shakespeares career as a dramatist was taking off tended todramatize efforts by people on the edges of society shepherds likeTamburlaine, Jews like Barabas, or scholars like Dr Faustus to dominatethe world and the stage. The foregrounding of such gures in Elizabethantragedy also has some connection with the relatively low social origins ofmost playwrights in the period: Shakespeare, like Marlowe, could barelyclaim to belong to the middling sort of men by birth, but by writing for thepopular stage he came to be wealthy and relatively well known. The tragedyofMacbeth is certainly not, as the more reductive kinds of Marxist criticismwould have it, a fable about the rise and self-destruction of the bourgeoi-sie,14 but it is not surprising that a provincial glovers son should have feltthat stories about the falls of princes might not speak directly to an audiencethat consisted partly of London apprentices and artisans. Characters who,




like the semi-tragic socially aspirational steward Malvolio in Twelfth Night,were not born great but who wanted to believe that they could achievegreatness were much closer to the aspirations of his audience.

The literary criticism of the period suggests some further answers to thequestion what was a Shakespearean tragedy?, although again the answers itprovides are neither clear nor simple. For Sir Philip Sidney (155486), themost inuential writer on poetics in Shakespeares lifetime, tragedy couldshake the bodies of tyrants and assist the government of the state: the highand excellent tragedy . . . openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth theulcers that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, andtyrants manifest their tyrannical humours; that with stirring the affects ofadmiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainty of this world, andupon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded.15 Sidney ends hissentence with a nod to the conventional view that tragedy represents themutability of fortune and the fragility of high ofce, but he begins it with areal bite: tragedy is a genre that maketh kings fear to be tyrants in thepresent tense. That aim was a strong component in theMirror for Magistrates,which began life under its Protestant editors in the reign of the CatholicQueen Mary as not just a series of plangent wailings by dead kings andcouncillors, but as such a biting critique of government that it was initiallysuppressed, and was not published until the reign of the ProtestantElizabeth.16 Shakespeares historical dramas (which include the plays set inancient Britain, King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline), repeatedly establishnervy intersections between present events and past tyrannies, as Chapter 6explores in detail. Whether or not Shakespeares Richard II was staged shortlybefore the ill-judged rebellion of the Earl of Essex against the Queen in 1601,and whether or not the Queen was referring to Shakespeares play when shefamously declared I am Richard II, know ye not that?, the scene in whichShakespeare dramatized the deposition of the king was deemed too hot toprint until the fourth quarto edition, which appeared ve years after the deathof Elizabeth.17 Shakespeare, like Sidney, certainly regarded tragedy as a formwhich could probe the wounds of the state.18

Sidneys view of tragedy was restated in slightly mufed form by GeorgePuttenham (152991) in his Art of English Poesy (1589). Puttenham locatesthe historical origins of tragedy in the (supposed) period in which tyrantshad become things of the past. Again, the function of tragedy is bothmorally and politically reforming:

But after that some men among the more became mighty and famous in theworld, sovereignty and dominion having learned them all manner of lusts

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and licentiousness of life, by which occasions also their high estates andfelicities fell many times into most low and lamentable fortunes, whereasbefore in their great prosperities they were both feared and reverenced in thehighest degree, after their deaths, when the posterity stood no more in dreadof them, their infamous life and tyrannies were laid open to all the world,their wickedness reproached, their follies and extreme insolencies derided,and their miserable ends painted out in plays and pageants, to show themutability of fortune, and the just punishment of God in revenge of a viciousand evil life.19

Puttenhams Art, however, did not simply present tragedy as form ofpolitical retrospect, which looks back to the tyrannical past to nd lessonsfor the present. It was itself retrospective: although printed in 1589 it wasprobably written during the 1570s and 1580s. Sidneys Apology also appearedin print almost a decade after its author had died. The slight antiquity ofboth these works was offset by their social cachet, since both Sidney andPuttenham wrote, or said they wrote, for courtly poets and readers, andPuttenham in particular regarded poetry as one of the arts of self-presentation by which an aspirant courtier could win advancement.20 Thestyles and manners of socially elite groups generally trickle down throughtime to less elevated members of a society. That trickle-down effect certainlyshaped the poetic tastes of the sixteenth century, since courtly fashions inverse tended to hit the press, the market and a popular readership around adecade after their rst dissemination. But we should not expect this processof cultural diffusion to have occurred in quite the same way in drama as itdid in poetry. Sidney and Puttenham chiey valued plays written for smallelite groups at the Inns of Court or other small, closed venues. Neither ofthem had a clue about how to appeal to the popular audience who paid tosee Shakespeares plays. As a result we might expect Shakespeare to haveread the theorists, to have thought about them (respectfully), but notnecessarily to have been guided by them in his practice.

One particular element in Sidneys Apology might have inuencedShakespeare much more than it actually did. In the latter part of theApology Sidney accuses contemporary dramatists of mingling kings andclowns onstage, and of being faulty both in place and time, by which hemeans that they failed to obey what came to be called the unities of time andplace.21 Sidney probably got his understanding of Aristotles unities notfrom the Poetics itself (of which a Latin translation appeared in 1498 and aGreek text in 1508, but which was not translated into English until theeighteenth century) but from Italian commentaries. Nevertheless he usedAristotelian principles as a stick with which to bash the popular stage. Ben




Jonson ventriloquized this aspect of Sidneys criticism in the prologue to theFolio edition of Every Man in his Humour (1616), in which he scolded thewriters of contemporary history plays, including Shakespeare, who withthree rusty swords, / And help of some few foot-and-half foot words, / Fightover York and Lancasters long jars / And in the tiring-house bring woundsto scars (912). That was the moment when the prescriptive Aristotelianvoice of Sidney spoke to Shakespeare as though from the grave.

But by the time it did so, probably around 1616, Shakespeare himselfmay have been in his grave too, although it is not known exactly whenJonson composed his prologue.22 If Shakespeare did live to hear JonsonsSidneian attack on him there is no sign that it inuenced the way he wrotetragedies, in which references to the passage of time are usually markers ofmood and atmosphere rather than signs of the playwrights Aristotelianaspirations to unity. When the notoriously anachronistic clock chimesrepeatedly in the background of Julius Caesar it serves as a reminder thatthis is the moment at which the conspirators must act, and that time isslipping away. Macbeth also contains bells, knockings and clocks, but timein that play is so elastic that its almost impossible to track its literal passage:the witches offer Macbeth kingship at an unspecied period hereafter, buthe labours to make their hereafter happen now, or tomorrow. After themurder of Duncan time stretches on, spreading from the bank and shoal ofthe present through tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow to the verycrack of doom. Theatrical time and place stretch and bend too: the sceneshifts to England in Act 4 while Macduff and Malcolm slow down the paceof the play by their dialogue about kingship and tyranny. This kind of time-stretching, in which the anxious pause before an action can seem like an age,and the period after it extend to eternity, would have been incomprehen-sible, and perhaps deplorable, to Sidney. It was also very different from thetreatment of time in Shakespeares comedies, in which, despite Orlandosclaim that there is no clock in the forest (As You Like It, 3.3.2545), timetends to be more classically regulated than it is in the tragedies. The actionof the early Comedy of Errors (1594) is restricted to a single place and day,while Shakespeares last single-authored play The Tempest (161011) ispunctuated with near clockwork regularity by allusions to the hour,which remind the audience that the plays action occupies not theAristotelian twenty-four hours but a magically compressed three.

Shakespeares comedies tended to be more regular (in the neo-classicalsense) in their treatment of time and place than most of his tragedies for onesimple and highly signicant reason. So far as most sixteenth-centuryEnglish readers were concerned there was a far more developed and

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accessible body of theoretical writing about comedy than there was abouttragedy. The standard Renaissance editions of the classical comediansPlautus (c. 254184 bc) and Terence (c. 190158 bc) included elaborateintroductions which discussed the ideal structure of a comic plot and theprinciples underlying that structure.23 The prologues to Terences plays alsoinclude critical reections on his own practices. Classical tragedy could offerno equivalent to any of this. If Shakespeare read (as he probably did) someGreek tragedies in Latin translation he would not have found in them anysystematic discussion of the structure or function of tragedy.24 The surviv-ing Roman tragedies by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 bc ad 65) are alsosilent about what a tragedymight be or how it should be structured. In thenineteenth century and indeed in the fourth century bc tragedy was thegenre on which most theories of drama were centred, and was regarded asthe most intellectually rigorous kind of theatre. For the sixteenth centurythat role was lled by comedy. It was from comic theory and practice thatplaywrights could develop their ideas about form, about plot construction,and indeed about how to represent theatrical characters in action.

This had profound consequences for Shakespeare in general and forShakespearean tragedy in particular. The presence of comic scenes inShakespeares tragedies was traditionally an embarrassment to critics, althoughSamuel Johnson memorably defended his interchange of seriousness andmerriment, by which the mind is softened at one time, exhilarated at another.These comic episodes the porter inMacbeth, the clown who wishes Cleopatraall joy of the worm before her death could just be a sign, as Johnson believed,that comedy was congenial to [Shakespeares] nature.25 They also show thebanal fact that throughout most of Shakespeares career the Fool was the mostrecognizable and at least the secondmost famous actor in his company.Writingplays whichwould giveWill Kempe or Robert Armin an evening off would be abit like putting on a Rolling Stones concert without Keith Richards. Writing atragedy in which the Fool suddenly and without explanation disappears, ashappens in King Lear, on the other hand, was the strongest means of showingan audience that catastrophe had nally arrived, and that all normal theatricalexpectations were blown apart.

But the relationship between Shakespearean tragedy and comedy goesmuch further than this. Classical comedy provided much of Shakespearesthinking about psychology and human action. In the plays of Plautuscharacters often form beliefs about what is happening around them. Veryoften they do so on the basis of hints, clues and tokens rather than of clearevidence. Sometimes these hints and clues are illusions, and at other timesthey are deliberately misleading performances (in a theatrical sense) put on




by other characters in order to trick or beguile their onstage audience.Sometimes when characters discover the falsity of these illusory beliefsPlautuss comedies move into potentially tragic terrain, in which peoplewonder who they are, or whether the world actually is as they believe it tobe. So in Plautuss Amphitryon, which is the only classical play to describeitself as a tragicomedia, Jove and Mercury disguise themselves as a warriorand his slave in order to seduce the warriors wife. The real slave meets hisdivine impersonator, who turns him away from his own house. He thinkshes gone mad. Elsewhere in Plautus characters are frequently persuadedthat what they thought was one person is in fact another person, and feel theworld melt around them as a result. In Plautuss Braggart Soldier a slave whoapparently witnesses his masters mistress kissing another man says I didntsee her and yet I did see her (non vidi eam, etsi vidi, 407).26

These moments, and the deeper interest in the nature of belief andtheatrical illusion from which they arise, had an incalculable inuence onShakespearean comedy and tragicomedy. When Troilus sees a womankissing Diomed who seems to be the Cressida who has just sworn to lovehim for ever he cries out This is and is not Cressid (5.2.145), in a direct echoof Plautuss comic slave which occurs at the moment when the genericallyuncategorizable Troilus and Cressida comes closest to tragedy. A world inwhich actions and beliefs are founded on inference rather than evidenceprovides a perfect ground for error; and perceptual error particularly whenit concerns love and acts of sexual indelity which by their nature cannot bedirectly witnessed can become a ground for tragedy.

Othello is in this respect not so much a tragedy as a classical comedy gonewrong.27 The play starts in a conventionally comic landscape, in which anenraged father blunders about at night while his daughter elopes, and youngmen-about-town cook up schemes for self-advancement. Throughout theplay characters insist that they, like characters in Plautus, ground theiractions and beliefs on probability rather than certain knowledge.Brabantio declares that Tis probable and palpable to thinking (1.2.76)that Othello has used magic to make Desdemona love him, and so assumesit to be true although it is false. Even the Duke of Venice supposes it ispossible enough to judgement (1.3.9) that the Turks are attacking Cyprusrather than knowing it for a fact. Othello himself and in a sense this is histragedy has a predisposition to short-circuit the process of coming to awell-founded belief: Ill see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; / And onthe proof, there is no more but this: / Away at once with love or jealousy(3.3.1924). He does not quite say when Im doubtful Ill look for moreevidence and assess the case accordingly. Doubt seems to become in the

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course of his sentence almost a foundation of proof: when I doubt, prove.Othello is constructed as a thought-experiment which is also a genericexperiment. It asks what would happen if you put a powerful and eloquentwarrior who simply cannot bear to experience doubt into a social landscapedrawn from classical comedy, in which human mental realities are foundedon beliefs rather than on certain knowledge.

The ultimate outcome of that experiment is not just Othellos lethaljealousy, but the unleashing of intense physical and rhetorical violence thatmakes the hero sound not like a character from Plautus, but like an importfrom one of the tragedies of Seneca:

Like to the Pontic Sea,Whose icy current and compulsive courseNeer feels retiring ebb but keeps due onTo the Propontic and the Hellespont,Even so my bloody thoughts with violent paceShall neer look back, neer ebb to humble love,Till that a capable and wide revengeSwallow them up. (3.3.45461)

Most of the ten tragedies ascribed to Seneca in the sixteenth century wereabout ancient mythical heroes, although one (and this is signicant giventhe connections between Shakespearean tragedies and history plays), theOctavia, was a tragedy about recent Roman history. Seneca wrote for andoften about periods of tyranny. He served as tutor to the Emperor Nero,and eventually was ordered to commit suicide by his former pupil. His playscan present acts of spectacular violence, but underlying them is often anideal of emotional autarchy or self-government, which might enable sub-jects of tyranny to experience some measure of control over the universewhich they inhabit.28 The combination of crafted rhetoric and physicalviolence in Senecas plays has been given a rough time by the criticaltradition, and their inuence on Shakespearean tragedy has often beenseriously underestimated as a result.29 Shakespeare, however, would havebeen mad to neglect Seneca, whom he could have read comfortably in theoriginal Latin or in the collection of English translations which appeared in1581. Playwrights in the generation just older than Shakespeare whom hesought to emulate and supersede Thomas Kyd (155894) andGeorge Peele(155696) in particular had made their debts to Senecan tragedies of bloodinstantly obvious. The analogy which Othello develops between histhoughts and the uncontrollable movements of the oceans is profoundlybut not directly Senecan, since very often in Senecas plays the universereverberates to the passions of his heroes and heroines. Other moments in




the tragedies are explicitly indebted to particular passages of Seneca. KingLear on the heath is Shakespeares strongest Senecan voice:

Let the great gods,That keep this dreadful pudder oer our heads,Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,That hast within thee undivulgd crimesUnwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand,Thou perjured and thou simular of virtueThat art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,That under covert and convenient seemingHas practised on mans life. Close pent up guilts,Rive your concealing continents and cryThese dreadful summoners grace. I am a manMore sinned against than sinning. (3.2.4758)

Lear echoes, amplies and transgures a speech from theHippolytus, a Senecanplay to which Shakespeare repeatedly returned in the course of his career:

Magne regnator deum,tam lentus audis scelera? tam lentus vides?et quando saeva fulmen emittes manu,si nunc serenum est? omnis impulsus ruataether et atris nubibus condat diem,ac versa retro sidera obliquos agantretorta cursus. tuque, sidereum caput,radiate Titan, tu nefas stirpis tuaespeculare? lucem merge et in tenebras fuge.cur dextra, divum rector atque hominum, vacattua, nec trisulca mundus ardescit face?in me tona, me ge, me velox cremettransactus ignis: sum nocens, merui mori. (67386)

Great king of the gods, do you hear about crimes so slowly? Do you see themso slowly? And when will you send the lightning bolt from your vengefulhand, since now the heavens are clear? Let the whole sky collapse inwards andhide the day in black clouds, let the stars turn backwards and swerving runtheir course askew. And you, head of stars, radiant Titan, do you look downat this crime by your offspring? Drown the light, and ee into darkness.Whyis your hand empty, ruler of gods and men, why do you not singe the worldwith your three-pronged brand? Strike me with lightning, transx me, let theswift re cremate me: I am guilty. I deserve to die.

The thunder of dissolution and retribution was, however, by no meansShakespeares only debt to Senecan tragedy. As early as 1589 the pamphleteerThomas Nashe was complaining that the Senecan style, with its heroes who

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utter sententiae (one-line memorable aphorisms) like blood is a beggar, wasold hat.30 Shakespeare, always acutely sensitive to fashion, took this prompt,and never imitated Seneca without giving a twist of novelty to his imitations.Lears speech turns Hippolytuss cry of guilt upside-down, insisting on hisown innocence, and calling down destruction not on himself but on others.The storm and thunderbolts which inHippolytus are only wished for but arepointedly not happening are realized onstage. Hamlet (which probablyderives from an earlier lost play in the Senecan style that Nashe deplored)also has Senecan moments, but again these are deliberately transformed. Atthe start of Senecas goriest play, Thyestes at the climax of which, as at theclimax of Titus Andronicus, a father is made to eat his own esh and blood Atreus berates himself for failing to act:

Ignave, iners, enervis et (quod maximumprobrum tyranno rebus in summis reor)inulte, post tot scelera, post fratris dolosfasque omne ruptum questibus vanis agisiratus Atreus? fremere iam totus tuisdebebat armis orbis, et geminum mareutrimque classes agere; iam ammis agroslucere et urbes decuit, ac strictum undiquemicare ferrum. (17684)

Lazy, useless, gutless, and (what I think is the worst failing in a tyrant who isdealing with the most important matters of all) unrevenged! Angry Atreus,after your brothers trickery and the violation of all good principles, are youjust whining on with vain complaints? Now the whole world should thunderwith your weapons, and eets should be setting sail from both shores of thetwin sea; now the elds ought to be alight with ames and the cities too, andthe drawn sword should ash on all sides.

Any member of Shakespeares audience who had a smattering of Latin andthat meant all those who had been to grammar school would hear these linesbehind the soliloquy which Hamlet delivers after the players leave him:

O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!. . .

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,That I, the son the dear murderd,Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,Must like a whore unpack my heart with words,And fall a-cursing like a very drab,A scullion!Fie upont, foh! (2.2.50241)




No one who knew Senecas Thyestes would have missed the differencesbetween those speeches either. Atreus goes on to make his brother feedon his own children. Hamlet by contrast persuades himself to act in thetheatrical rather than the practical sense, by staging his play designed tocatch the conscience of the king. Shakespeare heard in Seneca not just thesound of fury and cosmic destruction, but also a voice of contingency andpossibility, in which characters dont just simply do violent deeds, butdeliberate over what they might do and what should happen. SenecasAtreus does not just describe his actual revenge but a hypothetical revengeintroduced by the modal verbs should and ought (Now the whole worldshould thunder with your weapons). That tiny grammatical detail, which issomething of a habit in Senecas heroes, was of immense importancefor Shakespeare. He teased his Hamlet out from those modal verbs, andmade from them a play which is grounded on might in the grammaticalrather than in the physical sense. Hamlet is throughout the play captivatedby verbs and grammatical moods which evoke possibility: Now might I doit pat (3.3.73), he says when he catches Claudius at prayer; Now could Idrink hot blood he says just before he visits his mother (3.2.351). And whenthat fell sergeant Death carries him off, Hamlet again speaks the language ofpossibility rather than of actuality, with oh I could tell you / But let it be(5.2.31617). Hamlet is a quizzical and almost a parodic response to thephysically mighty heroes of Senecan tragedy; but his indecision whichBradley, and before him Coleridge, and before him Hegel, put at the centreof his character grows from the space between speaking and doing which issuch a strong element in the language of Senecas heroes.

That observation takes us close to the heart of Shakespearean tragedy. Itwould be only a slight exaggeration to say that acting is the central concernof the tragedies Shakespeare wrote in the period roughly from 1599 to 1606,and which Bradley regarded as the high-point of his tragic phase. Pickingup a sword and killing a king is an uncomplicated matter in the heat ofbattle, but deliberating beforehand, imagining a dagger, rehearsing the role,putting on the borrowed robes of Senecan rhetoric in order to persuadeyourself to do it: these are the theatrical and mental spaces explored inHamlet andMacbeth in particular. The point at which an agent is decidingto act, or is imagining the consequences of what he or she might do,provides a perfect occasion for soliloquies which represent the processes ofdeliberation. This pause before action, full of potential and of fear, was not amoment that Shakespeare simply discovered in the mature tragedies,however. In Titus Andronicus (c. 15934) there is a long delay between therape of Lavinia and Tituss revenge. In the interim between this action and

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Tituss reaction Titus himself acts strangely, plays mad, dresses up as a cook.In Julius Caesar (1599) the pause before action is shorter, but for Brutus itbecomes the occasion for what was called deliberative rhetoric, in whichthe pros and cons of a particular course of action are debated:

Between the acting of a dreadful thingAnd the rst motion, all the interim isLike a phantasma or a hideous dream. (2.1.635)

What Brutus describes as the interim is the temporal space between therst motion, or impulse to action, and its performance. That period givesan agent time to imagine what he should do, and it may spawn dreams andnightmares about what might happen if he does it. Shakespeare, like mostElizabethan schoolboys, was trained to compose speeches in which a real orimagined person might produce arguments both for and against a particularcourse of action a skill he deployed most famously in his theatrical careerin Hamlets deliberation whether To be or not to be. Shakespeare also readmanuals of ethics which described the complex interplay between acts ofimagination and will and the workings of the bodily humours and passions(discussed in Chapter 8). This enabled him in a very different way fromSophocles or Euripides to write dramas which address questions aboutaction, agency and responsibility.

Greek ethical thought was also part of the amalgam that madeShakespearean tragedy, even if Shakespeare, as seems likely, never read aword of Sophocles in Greek. Plutarchs Life of Coriolanus, which was thesource for Shakespeares Coriolanus, includes an extended discussion of howin Homer a mixture of human appetites and external promptings couldprompt someone to act:

But in wonderous and extraordinarie thinges, which are done by secretinspirations and motions, he [that is, Homer] doth not say that God takethaway from man his choyce and freedom of will, but that he doth move it:neither that he doth worke desire in us, but objecteth to our mindes certaineimaginations whereby we are lead to desire, and thereby doth not make thisour action forced, but openeth the way to our will, and addeth theretocourage, and hope of successe.31

Shakespeare was also an inheritor of a complex set of arguments, which hadrun through sixteenth-century Protestant theology, about the role played bythe human will in determining the ultimate destination of the soul in heavenor hell. As well as all of this, Shakespeare spent his days acting in a rathermore humdrum sense: he learned lines, some of which he had written himselfand some of which were written for him, and so experienced almost every day




the actors sense of inevitability, in which he knew the words he was going tospeak and the events which simply had to happen.He was therefore equippedto think about the grounds on which people act, was trained to representthrough rhetoric the processes of deliberation which might precede action,and he was skilled at using his own voice and body in another form of acting,by performing in plays. That made acting in Shakespearean tragedy a farricher concept than it was even to theGreek tragedians, since it fused togetherreligious, rhetorical and ethical thought with professional practice. WhenHamlet laments that he has the motive and the cue for passion but notpassion itself, he is speaking from this richly multiple view of what it is to act.

This leads to a point where discussion of what a Shakespearean tragedywas begins to suggest answers to the question of what a Shakespeareantragedy is. The temptation to provide a tidy formula for Shakespeareantragedy which resembles the quotation from Aristotle with which thischapter began should be resisted. Shakespearean tragedies have eclecticorigins, and that is the principal reason for their aesthetic power.Shakespeares own conception of what might be achieved by a play whichits printers might want to call a tragedy kept on changing. He experi-mented with late medieval traditions of tragedies about the falls of princes,and hybridized these with Tudor thought about historical process, and gavethem political force in the light of contemporary beliefs that tragedies couldinuence the government of the state. Shakespeare also absorbed andrefashioned Marlowes tragedies of social aspiration and moral transgres-sion, which gives a profoundly unclassical edginess and sense of displace-ment to his central characters. His tragedies absorbed a whole range ofthinking about imagination and probability, which can be traced to originsin legal and rhetorical traditions, as well as to classical comedy. Many ofthem show an interest in the nature of the will and of human desires whichis at once philosophically sophisticated and nally unresolvable to asingle philosophical position. That fuses with his skill in fashioningspeeches of deliberation to suit particular characters and occasions. SomeShakespearean tragedies explore how human aspirations and desires areimaginatively projected on to the world, and the multiple ways in whichthose desires do not quite manage to turn into actions in quite the way theagent wanted. Some present agents whose destruction seems to resonatewith the surrounding world. Those features of the plays show Shakespearesdeep debt to the tragedies of Seneca.

But these plays the products of rapid and deep thought, which have eversince their composition provided occasions for deep thought in their readersand audiences are by no means purely cerebral. Shakespeares audiences

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could, not far from the Globe, pay a penny or so to witness dogs being tornapart by bears chained to posts. They could also see public executions, whichwere often explicitly compared to tragedies as when Chidiock Tichborne,about to be partially strangulated, disembowelled while still alive and then cutup into segments by the public hangman for his part in the Babington plot in1586, declared Here you see a company of young men (and that Generositoo) playing a woefull Tragedy.32 Tichbornes theatrical metaphors (com-pany, Tragedy) were not simply conventional. Elizabethan tragedies canmake the body scream in pain. When King Lear says I am bound / Upon awheel of re, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead (4.6.435)Tichbornes theatrical metaphors are inverted: a player king lays claim inmetaphor to the physical torment which was literally enacted close by on thescaffold of execution. Running right through Shakespearean tragedy, fromthe mutilation of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus to the blinding of Gloucester inKing Lear, and from the sacricial slaughter of Julius Caesar, so thoughtfullyplanned and yet so carnal to witness, to the butchery of Coriolanus, there is aperplexing conjunction between raw physicality and rened questions aboutmotive and agency. This diversity of purpose and origin, in which physicalviolence meets metaphysical speculation, is not simply an accidental elementof Shakespearean tragedy. Diversity of purpose makes it thrilling, and alsomakes it defy simple denition. WatchingHamlet is not a matter of workingout what the Prince is thinking or feeling, as it was for Bradley. Nor is it amatter of experiencing pity and terror in an elevated form, as a neo-Aristotelian critic might wish. Nor is it simply (as the most radical attemptto break free of character-based readings of the play proposes)33 a play thatbroods on the material fact of losing ones inheritance. The play is a quizzicalact of conjunction and comprehension. An audience watches a player and aplaywright pull together a whole range of divergent interests and intellectualpreoccupations in order to make a kind of tragic drama that seemed new. Theplay requires its audience, like Simon Forman when he watchedMacbeth, tomake inferences about who has done what and who knows what, and itpresses that process of making inferences to the outer limit of uncertainty.Sometimes the play and the Prince seem to sprawl off to meditate on deathand the destruction of the body in ways that seem beyond the immediatepurpose; sometimes the terror of death slows the action to a crawl; sometimesthe collectivity of laughter weaves itself in with the shared experience ofmortality, as when the gravediggers banter about time and death and bodilydecay.

This diversity of purpose, origins and effects means that responses to theplay are likely to be as various and numerous as its audiences. A guilty king




watching it might give himself away by displaying what Sidney called theulcers that are covered with tissue of his usurped state, as Claudius doeswhen he calls for light in the middle of the performance of The Mousetrap.A stoic like Horatio might see in it a simple moral, a tale of accidentaljudgements, casual slaughters (5.2.361). A pedant like Polonius might see init a mixture of generic conventions. A self-improving man about town likeSamuel Pepys might think that learning to recite To be or not to be was avery ribbon in the cap of youth. Hamlet himself might hear in it the untoldtale which he would tell if death did not carry him off. Any mortal mightwitness in the play a primal panic in the face of death, which is given anadditional impulse by the cloudy imperative to revenge, to die and to go youknow not where. But then again an apprentice butcher in the audiencemight think the climactic sword-ght was really the best bit, and mightlaugh if his friend were spattered by sheeps blood when Claudius is nallystabbed. These plays are very nearly overburdened by the multiplicity oftheir purposes and origins, and that is what makes them permanentlygreat not as works of art consciously grounded in determinable principles,but as hyper-principled, hyper-ambitious and endlessly overdeterminedctions.

Notes

1. D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism: ThePrincipal Texts in New Translations (Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 97.

2. See Stephen Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics (London: Duckworth, 1986),pp. 184201 and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck andEthics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986),pp. 37891.

3. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 22.

4. Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics, pp. 21522.5. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, ed. and trans.

T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. ii, pp. 1192237.6. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 18.7. Samuel Pepys, The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham (London: Bell and

Hyman, 1985), pp. 281, 442.8. Ibid., p. 86.9. Arthur C. Kirsch, A Caroline Commentary on the Drama,Modern Philology 66

(1969): 25661; 2578.10. Bodleian Ashmole MS 208, fol. 207, transcribed in E. K. Chambers, William

Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press,1930), vol. iii, pp. 3378. Formans notes were discovered by the forger JohnPayne Collier, and doubt has sometimes been cast on their authenticity.

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11. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare andRenaissance Drama (Oxford University Press, 2007).

12. See Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgates Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in itsLiterary and Political Contexts (Oxford University Press, 2005), especiallypp. 153218.

13. William Baldwin,TheMirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1938), p. 345.

14. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 6:Like Macbeth, the bourgeoisie will become entangled in its own excess, givingbirth to its own gravedigger (the working class).

15. Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidneys The Defence of Poesy and Selected RenaissanceLiterary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 278.

16. See Scott Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the EnglishReformation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).

17. For the arguments, see Blair Worden, Which PlayWas Performed at the GlobeTheatre on 7 February 1601?, London Review of Books (12 July 2003): 224 andJason Scott-Warren, Was Elizabeth Richard II: The Authenticity of LambardesConversation, Review of English Studies (2012), http://res.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/07/14/res.hgs062.full.pdf.

18. See RebeccaW. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater inthe English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

19. Alexander, Renaissance Literary Criticism, p. 85.20. See Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton

University Press, 1978).21. Alexander, Renaissance Literary Criticism, pp. 456.22. See David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, eds., The Cambridge

Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 2012),vol. iv, p. 624.

23. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and theDevelopment of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley and London: University ofCalifornia Press, 1978), pp. 10747.

24. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1977),pp. 85118.

25. Samuel Johnson, Works, ed. Walter Jackson Bate, 23 vols. (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 19582010), vol. vii, pp. 689.

26. See further Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: the Inuence ofPlautus and Terence (Oxford University Press, 1994) and Alison Sharrock,Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence(Cambridge University Press, 2009).

27. See Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology andShakespearean Selfhood (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,2010) and Hutson, Invention of Suspicion.

28. See Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: AngersPrivilege (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985), Robert




S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Inuence of Seneca (OxfordUniversity Press, 1992).

29. For parallels see John William Cunliffe, The Inuence of Seneca on ElizabethanTragedy: An Essay (London: Macmillan, 1893); for a claim that these do notderive directly from Seneca see G. K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and CulturalTradition: Studies in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Liverpool UniversityPress, 1978), pp. 15973. For the pro-Senecan backlash, see Emrys Jones, TheOrigins of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 26772.

30. Thomas Nashe, Works, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson, 4 vols.(Oxford University Press, 1958), vol. iii, pp. 31516.

31. Plutarchs Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Thomas North, ed.George Wyndham, 6 vols. (London: D. Nutt, 1895), vol. ii, p. 181.

32. Richard S.M. Hirsch, The Works of Chidiock Tichborne, English LiteraryRenaissance 16 (1986): 30318; 313.

33. See Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge University Press,2007).

Further reading

Altman, J. B.,The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and ShakespeareanSelfhood (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Braden, Gordon, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Angers Privilege(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985).

Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1957).

Bushnell, Rebecca W., Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in theEnglish Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

de Grazia, Margreta, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge University Press, 2007).Hutson, Lorna, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and

Renaissance Drama (Oxford University Press, 2007).Jones, Emrys, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 1977).

Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).Kerrigan, J., Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1996).Miola, Robert, S., Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Inuence of Seneca

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).Smith, Emma, Shakespeares Tragedies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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colin burrow, “what is a shakespearean tragedy” (2013)

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