Shakespearean tragedy

• Chaucer

  • Seemingly the first person to define tragedy
  • 'Tragedy means a literary composition written in happier times recalling events that ended in misery'
  • Seems obvious in our hypertheoretical age, but simply calls attention to the universal power of tragedies
  • Defines the inescapable trajectory of tragedy but not the cause for it
  • In David Scott Kastan's: A rarity most beloved
• Chaucer and King Lear

  • Chaucer's definition of tragedy finds its most powerful analogue in the agonising silences of Shakespeare's tragedies:
  • "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?"
  • King Lear cries this while he holds his broken child - no answer is forthcoming, though it lies in the incalculable murderousness of the world and directly questioning that world produces no more satisfying responses: "Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?"
  • From David Scott Kastan's: A rarity most beloved
• Tragedy as an unanswered question

  • Are there reasons for the intolerable suffering?
  • Is tragic motor human error or capricious fate?
  • Is the catastrophe a just, if appalling, retribution, or an arbitrary destiny reflecting the indifference or, worse, the malignity of the heavens?
  • From David Scott Kastan's: A Rarity most Beloved: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy
• Shakespeare's tragedy

  • Uncertainty is the point
  • Characters may commit themselves to a confident sense of the idea of tragedy but plays inevitably render that preliminary understanding inadequate
  • From David Scott Kastan's: A Rarity Most Beloved: Shakespeare and the idea of tragedy
• Shakespeare's tragedy pt 2

  • It is the emotional truth of the struggle to reconstruct the truth of tragedy rather than the metaphysical one that is the centre of the plays
  • Shakespeare's tragedies pose questions about the cause of pain and loss in the play and in the refusal of any answers starkly prevents any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering
  • From David Scott Kastan's A Rarity Most Beloved: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy
• Shakespeare's Tragedy pt 3

  • Kenneth Muir's off-quoted comment that: "There is no such thing as a Shakespearian tragedy: there are only Shakespearian tragedies begs the question of how 'Shakespearian' modifies 'tragedy' either as an individual example or a group
  • If Muir is saying that Shakespeare has not written a tragedy driven by a fully developed theoretical conception of the genre we can easily assent, but a compelling sense of tragedy can be seen to develop in his plays
  • From David Scott Kastan's A Rarity Most Beloved: Shakespeare and the idea of tragedy
• Shakespeare's tragedy pt 4

  • Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering and he writes in that mode the successive plays reveal an ever more profound formal acknowledgement of their desolating controlling logic
  • From David Scott Kastan's A Rarity Most Beloved: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy