A. C. Bradley - Shakespearean Tragedy
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A. C. Bradley >> Shakespearean Tragedy
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39 SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON.BOMBAY.CALCUTTA.MADRAS.MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK.BOSTON.CHICAGO.DALLAS.SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
LECTURES ON
HAMLET, OTHELLO, KING LEAR
MACBETH
BY
A.C. BRADLEY
LL.D. LITT.D., FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
_SECOND EDITION_ (_THIRTEENTH IMPRESSION_)
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1919
_COPYRIGHT._
First Edition 1904.
Second Edition March 1905.
Reprinted August 1905, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1916,
1918, 1919.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
LTD.
TO MY STUDENTS
PREFACE
These lectures are based on a selection from materials used in teaching
at Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford; and I have for the most part
preserved the lecture form. The point of view taken in them is explained
in the Introduction. I should, of course, wish them to be read in their
order, and a knowledge of the first two is assumed in the remainder; but
readers who may prefer to enter at once on the discussion of the several
plays can do so by beginning at page 89.
Any one who writes on Shakespeare must owe much to his predecessors.
Where I was conscious of a particular obligation, I have acknowledged
it; but most of my reading of Shakespearean criticism was done many
years ago, and I can only hope that I have not often reproduced as my
own what belongs to another.
Many of the Notes will be of interest only to scholars, who may find, I
hope, something new in them.
I have quoted, as a rule, from the Globe edition, and have referred
always to its numeration of acts, scenes, and lines.
_November, 1904._
* * * * *
NOTE TO SECOND AND SUBSEQUENT IMPRESSIONS
In these impressions I have confined myself to making some formal
improvements, correcting indubitable mistakes, and indicating here and
there my desire to modify or develop at some future time statements
which seem to me doubtful or open to misunderstanding. The changes,
where it seemed desirable, are shown by the inclusion of sentences in
square brackets.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
LECTURE I.
THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY 5
LECTURE II.
CONSTRUCTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES 40
LECTURE III.
SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGIC PERIOD--HAMLET 79
LECTURE IV.
HAMLET 129
LECTURE V.
OTHELLO 175
LECTURE VI.
OTHELLO 207
LECTURE VII.
KING LEAR 243
LECTURE VIII.
KING LEAR 280
LECTURE IX.
MACBETH 331
LECTURE X.
MACBETH 366
NOTE A. Events before the opening of the action in _Hamlet_ 401
NOTE B. Where was Hamlet at the time of his father's death? 403
NOTE C. Hamlet's age 407
NOTE D. 'My tables--meet it is I set it down' 409
NOTE E. The Ghost in the cellarage 412
NOTE F. The Player's speech in _Hamlet_ 413
NOTE G. Hamlet's apology to Laertes 420
NOTE H. The exchange of rapiers 422
NOTE I. The duration of the action in
_Othello_ 423
NOTE J. The 'additions' in the Folio text of _Othello_. The
Pontic sea 429
NOTE K. Othello's courtship 432
NOTE L. Othello in the Temptation scene 434
NOTE M. Questions as to _Othello_, IV. i. 435
NOTE N. Two passages in the last scene of _Othello_ 437
NOTE O. Othello on Desdemona's last words 438
NOTE P. Did Emilia suspect Iago? 439
NOTE Q. Iago's suspicion regarding Cassio and Emilia 441
NOTE R. Reminiscences of _Othello_ in _King Lear_ 441
NOTE S. _King Lear_ and _Timon of Athens_ 443
NOTE T. Did Shakespeare shorten _King Lear_? 445
NOTE U. Movements of the _dramatis personae_ in _King
Lear_, II 448
NOTE V. Suspected interpolations in _King Lear_ 450
NOTE W. The staging of the scene of Lear's reunion with
Cordelia 453
NOTE X. The Battle in _King Lear_ 456
NOTE Y. Some difficult passages in _King Lear_ 458
NOTE Z. Suspected interpolations in _Macbeth_ 466
NOTE AA. Has _Macbeth_ been abridged? 467
NOTE BB. The date of _Macbeth_. Metrical Tests 470
NOTE CC. When was the murder of Duncan first plotted? 480
NOTE DD. Did Lady Macbeth really faint? 484
NOTE EE. Duration of the action in _Macbeth_. Macbeth's age.
'He has no children' 486
NOTE FF. The Ghost of Banquo 492
INDEX 494
INTRODUCTION
In these lectures I propose to consider the four principal tragedies of
Shakespeare from a single point of view. Nothing will be said of
Shakespeare's place in the history either of English literature or of
the drama in general. No attempt will be made to compare him with other
writers. I shall leave untouched, or merely glanced at, questions
regarding his life and character, the development of his genius and art,
the genuineness, sources, texts, inter-relations of his various works.
Even what may be called, in a restricted sense, the 'poetry' of the four
tragedies--the beauties of style, diction, versification--I shall pass
by in silence. Our one object will be what, again in a restricted sense,
may be called dramatic appreciation; to increase our understanding and
enjoyment of these works as dramas; to learn to apprehend the action and
some of the personages of each with a somewhat greater truth and
intensity, so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little
less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator. For
this end all those studies that were mentioned just now, of literary
history and the like, are useful and even in various degrees necessary.
But an overt pursuit of them is not necessary here, nor is any one of
them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the
plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of
reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of
Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespeare scholar.
Such lovers read a play more or less as if they were actors who had to
study all the parts. They do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts
the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use; but they
want to realise fully and exactly the inner movements which produced
these words and no other, these deeds and no other, at each particular
moment. This, carried through a drama, is the right way to read the
dramatist Shakespeare; and the prime requisite here is therefore a vivid
and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is
necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to
compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this
task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They
misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two
things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis,
it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination
aside and to substitute some supposed 'cold reason'; and it is only want
of practice that makes the concurrent use of analysis and of poetic
perception difficult or irksome. And, in the second place, these
dissecting processes, though they are also imaginative, are still, and
are meant to be, nothing but means to an end. When they have finished
their work (it can only be finished for the time) they give place to the
end, which is that same imaginative reading or re-creation of the drama
from which they set out, but a reading now enriched by the products of
analysis, and therefore far more adequate and enjoyable.
This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture, with
merely personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation. And
so, before coming to the first of the four tragedies, I propose to
discuss some preliminary matters which concern them all. Though each is
individual through and through, they have, in a sense, one and the same
substance; for in all of them Shakespeare represents the tragic aspect
of life, the tragic fact. They have, again, up to a certain point, a
common form or structure. This substance and this structure, which would
be found to distinguish them, for example, from Greek tragedies, may, to
diminish repetition, be considered once for all; and in considering them
we shall also be able to observe characteristic differences among the
four plays. And to this may be added the little that it seems necessary
to premise on the position of these dramas in Shakespeare's literary
career.
Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold
good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside
_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, and _Macbeth_. But it will often apply
to these other works only in part, and to some of them more fully than
to others. _Romeo and Juliet_, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it
is an early work, and in some respects an immature one. _Richard III._
and _Richard II._, _Julius Caesar_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, and
_Coriolanus_ are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which
Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain obligation to follow his
authority, even when that authority offered him an undramatic material.
Probably he himself would have met some criticisms to which these plays
are open by appealing to their historical character, and by denying that
such works are to be judged by the standard of pure tragedy. In any
case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter of fact,
considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is said
of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications which
I shall often take for granted without mention. There remain _Titus
Andronicus_ and _Timon of Athens_. The former I shall leave out of
account, because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did so
before he had either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic
conception. _Timon_ stands on a different footing. Parts of it are
unquestionably Shakespeare's, and they will be referred to in one of the
later lectures. But much of the writing is evidently not his, and as it
seems probable that the conception and construction of the whole tragedy
should also be attributed to some other writer, I shall omit this work
too from our preliminary discussions.
LECTURE I
THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
The question we are to consider in this lecture may be stated in a
variety of ways. We may put it thus: What is the substance of a
Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from
the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and another?
Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented
by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in this tragedy and
now in that? And we are putting the same question when we ask: What is
Shakespeare's tragic conception, or conception of tragedy?
These expressions, it should be observed, do not imply that Shakespeare
himself ever asked or answered such a question; that he set himself to
reflect on the tragic aspects of life, that he framed a tragic
conception, and still less that, like Aristotle or Corneille, he had a
theory of the kind of poetry called tragedy. These things are all
possible; how far any one of them is probable we need not discuss; but
none of them is presupposed by the question we are going to consider.
This question implies only that, as a matter of fact, Shakespeare in
writing tragedy did represent a certain aspect of life in a certain way,
and that through examination of his writings we ought to be able, to
some extent, to describe this aspect and way in terms addressed to the
understanding. Such a description, so far as it is true and adequate,
may, after these explanations, be called indifferently an account of the
substance of Shakespearean tragedy, or an account of Shakespeare's
conception of tragedy or view of the tragic fact.
Two further warnings may be required. In the first place, we must
remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot
arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from
his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding
things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one
of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these
poets at their best always look at things in one light; but _Hamlet_ and
_Henry IV._ and _Cymbeline_ reflect things from quite distinct
positions, and Shakespeare's whole dramatic view is not to be identified
with any one of these reflections. And, in the second place, I may
repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to
be content with his _dramatic_ view, and are not to ask whether it
corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry--the
opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call 'Shakespeare
the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he was a very
simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some have
maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we can,
that in his works he expressed his deepest and most cherished
convictions on ultimate questions, or even that he had any. And in his
dramatic conceptions there is enough to occupy us.
1
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to
shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start
directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of
Shakespearean Tragedy. And first, to begin from the outside, such a
tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons (many more
than the persons in a Greek play, unless the members of the Chorus are
reckoned among them); but it is pre-eminently the story of one person,
the 'hero,'[1] or at most of two, the 'hero' and 'heroine.' Moreover, it
is only in the love-tragedies, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and
Cleopatra_, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the
hero. The rest, including _Macbeth_, are single stars. So that, having
noticed the peculiarity of these two dramas, we may henceforth, for the
sake of brevity, ignore it, and may speak of the tragic story as being
concerned primarily with one person.
The story, next, leads up to, and includes, the _death_ of the hero. On
the one hand (whatever may be true of tragedy elsewhere), no play at the
end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense,
a tragedy; and we no longer class _Troilus and Cressida_ or _Cymbeline_
as such, as did the editors of the Folio. On the other hand, the story
depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and
leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by
'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is,
in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to
death.
The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a
conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are
also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or
glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease,
poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous
or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.
Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero,
and--we must now add--generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as
to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in
tragedy and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of
pity. But the proportions of this ingredient, and the direction taken by
tragic pity, will naturally vary greatly. Pity, for example, has a much
larger part in _King Lear_ than in _Macbeth_, and is directed in the one
case chiefly to the hero, in the other chiefly to minor characters.
Let us now pause for a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They
would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it
presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy
meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of
this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from
Chaucer. Chaucer's _Monk's Tale_ is a series of what he calls
'tragedies'; and this means in fact a series of tales _de Casibus
Illustrium Virorum_,--stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as
Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And the Monk ends the tale
of Croesus thus:
Anhanged was Cresus, the proude kyng;
His roial trone myghte hym nat availle.
Tragedie is noon oother maner thyng,
Ne kan in syngyng crie ne biwaille
But for that Fortune alwey wole assaile
With unwar strook the regnes that been proude;
For whan men trusteth hire, thanne wol she faille,
And covere hire brighte face with a clowde.
A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who 'stood in
high degree,' happy and apparently secure,--such was the tragic fact to
the mediaeval mind. It appealed strongly to common human sympathy and
pity; it startled also another feeling, that of fear. It frightened men
and awed them. It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the
plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some
other name,--a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and
then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.
Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes
beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the
identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored. Tragedy
with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of 'high degree';
often with kings or princes; if not, with leaders in the state like
Coriolanus, Brutus, Antony; at the least, as in _Romeo and Juliet_, with
members of great houses, whose quarrels are of public moment. There is a
decided difference here between _Othello_ and our three other tragedies,
but it is not a difference of kind. Othello himself is no mere private
person; he is the General of the Republic. At the beginning we see him
in the Council-Chamber of the Senate. The consciousness of his high
position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no
longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great
world, and his last speech begins,
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know it.[2]
And this characteristic of Shakespeare's tragedies, though not the most
vital, is neither external nor unimportant. The saying that every
death-bed is the scene of the fifth act of a tragedy has its meaning,
but it would not be true if the word 'tragedy' bore its dramatic sense.
The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the
same in a peasant and a prince; but, not to insist that they cannot be
so when the prince is really a prince, the story of the prince, the
triumvir, or the general, has a greatness and dignity of its own. His
fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls
suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall
produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the
omnipotence--perhaps the caprice--of Fortune or Fate, which no tale of
private life can possibly rival.
Such feelings are constantly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies,--again
in varying degrees. Perhaps they are the very strongest of the emotions
awakened by the early tragedy of _Richard II._, where they receive a
concentrated expression in Richard's famous speech about the antic
Death, who sits in the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and his fancied security
have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little
pin through his castle wall. And these feelings, though their
predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful
there. In the figure of the maddened Lear we see
A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,
Past speaking of in a king;
and if we would realise the truth in this matter we cannot do better
than compare with the effect of _King Lear_ the effect of Tourgenief's
parallel and remarkable tale of peasant life, _A King Lear of the
Steppes_.
2
A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of
exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But
it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from
another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man,
descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness
like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was
the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were
well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing
him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it
become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind
from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as
sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities
of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly
from actions, and those the actions of men.
We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we
see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in these
circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these
others beget others again, until this series of inter-connected deeds
leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. The effect
of such a series on imagination is to make us regard the sufferings
which accompany it, and the catastrophe in which it ends, not only or
chiefly as something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally
as something which is caused by them. This at least may be said of the
principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always contributes
in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes.
This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first.
Men, from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents,
'themselves the authors of their proper woe'; and our fear and pity,
though they will not cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly. We
are now to consider this second aspect, remembering that it too is only
one aspect, and additional to the first, not a substitute for it.
The 'story' or 'action' of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of
course, solely of human actions or deeds; but the deeds are the
predominant factor. And these deeds are, for the most part, actions in
the full sense of the word; not things done ''tween asleep and wake,'
but acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer,--characteristic
deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal
truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing
in action.
Shakespeare's main interest lay here. To say that it lay in _mere_
character, or was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake,
for he was dramatic to the tips of his fingers. It is possible to find
places where he has given a certain indulgence to his love of poetry,
and even to his turn for general reflections; but it would be very
difficult, and in his later tragedies perhaps impossible, to detect
passages where he has allowed such freedom to the interest in character
apart from action. But for the opposite extreme, for the abstraction of
mere 'plot' (which is a very different thing from the tragic 'action'),
for the kind of interest which predominates in a novel like _The Woman
in White_, it is clear that he cared even less. I do not mean that this
interest is absent from his dramas; but it is subordinate to others, and
is so interwoven with them that we are rarely conscious of it apart, and
rarely feel in any great strength the half-intellectual, half-nervous
excitement of following an ingenious complication. What we do feel
strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and
catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main
source of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare,
'character is destiny' is no doubt an exaggeration, and one that may
mislead (for many of his tragic personages, if they had not met with
peculiar circumstances, would have escaped a tragic end, and might even
have lived fairly untroubled lives); but it is the exaggeration of a
vital truth.
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