essay questions on shakespearean tragedy

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What Is Shakespearean Tragedy? (Oxford Handbook Shakespearean Tragedy)

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• > The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy
• > What is a Shakespearean tragedy?

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• 1 What is a Shakespearean tragedy?
• 2 The language of tragedy
• 3 Tragedy in Shakespeare’s career
• 4 Shakespearean tragedy printed and performed
• 5 Religion and Shakespearean tragedy
• 6 Tragedy and political authority
• 7 Gender and family
• 8 The tragic subject and its passions
• 9 Tragedies of revenge and ambition
• 10 Shakespeare’s tragedies of love
• 11 Shakespeare’s classical tragedies
• 12 The critical reception of Shakespeare’s tragedies
• 13 Antony and Cleopatra in the theatre
• Select bibliography
• Series List

1 - What is a Shakespearean tragedy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

‘Double, double toil and trouble . . .’

An eminent Shakespearean scholar famously remarked that there is no such thing as Shakespearean Tragedy: there are only Shakespearean tragedies. Attempts (he added) to find a formula which fits every one of Shakespeare's tragedies and distinguishes them collectively from those of other dramatists invariably meet with little success. Yet when challenging one such attempt he noted its failure to observe what he termed 'an essential part of the [Shakespearean] tragic pattern'; which would seem to imply that these plays do have some shared characteristics peculiar to them.

Nevertheless, objections to comprehensive definitions of ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ are well founded. Such definitions tend to ignore the uniqueness of each play and the way it has been structured and styled to fit the particular source-narrative. More generally, they can obscure the fact that what distinguishes Shakespeare’s tragedies from everyone else’s and prompts us to consider them together are not so much common denominators but rather the power of Shakespeare’s language, his insight into character, and his dramaturgical inventiveness.

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• What is a Shakespearean tragedy?
• By Tom McAlindon
• Edited by Claire McEachern , University of California, Los Angeles
• Book: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy
• Online publication: 28 May 2006
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521790093.001

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet — Hamlet: A Tragic Hero of Shakespearean Proportions

Hamlet: a Tragic Hero of Shakespearean Proportions

• Categories: Hamlet

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Literary English

Characteristics of Shakespearian Tragedy | William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s tragedy.

 The dramatic form of classical tragedy derives from the tragic plays of ancient Athens, which depicted the downfall of a hero or famous character of Greek legend. The hero would struggle against overwhelming fate, and his defeat would be so noble that he wins the moral victory over the forces that destroy him. A tragedy evoked pity and terror in the audience; it was a catharsis, or washing clean of the soul, which left the spectator trembling but purified.

Unity, Time, and Place

Aristotle proposed the tragic unities of Place, Time, and Action, that is, the whole tragedy would take place in a single location, for example, a house or a city square (this included messengers who came in from elsewhere), it would happen during the course of one day (including speeches about events which had happened in the past), and it would be a single story, without sub- plots. Compared with these strict rules, Shakespeare’s tragedy is a more relaxed genre, but Othello much more than, for example, the sprawling Hamlet, observes the spirit of Aristotle. Othello, apart from Act I in Venice, is located entirely within the fortress at Cyprus. Although logically the play covers an unspecified time lapse of, we presume, two or three weeks, it proceeds, more or less, by major scenes through the hours of the day, starting in Venice with the elopement after midnight, the Senate meeting at dawn, then at Cyprus with the morning storm and afternoon landings and developments, the fateful drinking party in the early evening and the murder at bed time. This is not to say that everything happens in the same day; it obviously cannot, but the impression is of an abstract day unfolding. The plot is fairly unified, focusing on Othello and his fate, and dealing with other people and events only in so far as they are relevant to this focus. Othello is about as near as Shakespeare gets to classical tragedy.

The Tragic Flaw

A. C. Bradley saw Shakespearean tragedy characterized by the “tragic flaw,” the internal imperfection in the hero that brings him down. His downfall becomes his own doing, and he is no longer, as in classical tragedy, the helpless victim of fate. Some say that Othello’s tragic flaw was jealousy which flared at suspicion and rushed into action unchecked by calm common sense. A more modern interpretation would say that Othello’s tragic flaw was that he had internalized, that is taken into himself, the prejudices of those who surrounded him. In his heart he had come to believe what they believed: that a black man is an unattractive creature, not quite human, unworthy of love. Thinking this, he could not believe that Desdemona could truly love him for himself. Her love must be a pretense, or a flawed and corrupted emotion. Iago hinted at these ideas, and Othello rushed to accept them, because they echoed his deepest fears and insecurities.

The Shakespearean Play’s Structure

Shakespearean tragedy usually works on a five-part structure, corresponding to the five acts: Part One, the exposition, outlines the situation, introduces the main characters, and begins the action. Part Two, the development, continues the action and introduces complications. Part Three, the crisis (or climax), brings everything to a head. In this part, a change of direction occurs or understanding is precipitated. Part Four includes further developments leading inevitably to Part Five, in which the final crisis of action or revelation and resolution are explained. Othello follows this pattern.

Related Articles

• Brief Introduction to Othello
• Characters in the Play Othello
• Act-wise Summary of Othello
• Major Themes in the Play
• Othello as a Play of Intrigues
• Othello’s Tragic Flaw and Hamartia
• Character Analysis of Othello
• Character Analysis of Iago
• Character Analysis of Desdemona

Shakespearean Tragedy Questions and Answers

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Shakespearean Tragedy

I want to do work on this platform., the play *macbeth* is a product of both shakespeare's individual ingenuity and the greek classical tradition" discuss.

What is Shakespearean Tragedy?

An excerpt from “What is Shakespearean Tragedy?” forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy

The question “What is Shakespearean Tragedy?” can understandably prompt one to start listing distinctive features of various plays by Shakespeare — as if a successful enumeration of its characteristics would amount to an understanding of the genre….

…However, rather than approach Shakespearean tragedy as the sum-total of certain features or “facts,” or as a generic object of study, I propose that we see Shakespearean tragedy as a discrete form of art — as the birth of a distinctive art form, the same way we think of “painting on canvas” or “symphonic music” as art forms that arrived on the world stage at a particular place and time.[1] Whereas a “genre” purports to be a collection of objects that share common, taxonomically graspable features or techniques, there is no exhaustive list of features that ‘add up’ to Shakespearean tragedy — since, for a start, it is up to us to discern, decide, or debate, what will even count as features of this art form. Moreover, if Shakespearean tragedies all shared certain inherent, generic characteristics, then it would be difficult to distinguish between Macbeth and Hamlet and Othello — but of course we all know that each of these is an entirely different play; each brings to light new features or expressive possibilities for Shakespearean tragedy, helping us to better discern the art form as such, to better see its purview or expressive task. Shakespearean tragedies show what they are, as an art form, in light of one another. For the same reason, though it is unconventional to say so, we should probably regard Shakespearean tragedy not just as a finite, canonical collection of plays by William Shakespeare [ Hamlet , Macbeth , Othello, King Lear and so forth] but as a novel, modern artistic practice — instanced with special power in a range of works by Shakespeare, but still practicable by others afterwards. Shakespeare may have been the first, or the most successful or the most indispensable, to work in the medium of Shakespearean tragedy, but he was not the last.[2]

To see Shakespearean tragedy as art form, then, is to see it a practice that, having originated somewhere and sometime (with Shakespeare, in this instance), takes on a life of its own by generating new features, techniques and characteristics — thereby resisting any final taxonomy, at least so long as the art form remains vital as a human practice. If to delimit a “genre” is to circumscribe a domain of objects or experiences according to constitutive traits or attributes, then art forms or practices take it upon themselves to “work through,” or make sense of, their own socio-historical and material pre-conditions — as if expressing a newly discovered need for such sense-making.

All this gets me to the question that I really want to raise in this brief essay: What does the art form of Shakespearean tragedy “work through,” respond to, and make sense of?

In what follows, I will propose at least one answer to this:Shakespearean tragedy works through the loss of any “given” — nature, or God, or “fate” — that might explain human societies, histories, actions, destinies, relationships and values. Shakespeare challenges us to understand tragedies not as responding to existential facts (desire, or mortality) or historical situations (Henry V’s invasion of France, or the fate of the Roman republic), but as responding to the fact that there are no givens that fully govern our activities. At the same time, Shakespearean tragedy works through the loss of social bonds on which we depend for the meaning and worth of our lives together — showing those bonds to be, in spite of that dependence, fully dissolvable. In this way, Shakespearean tragedy helps us make sense of how we interact one another — without the help of any Archimedean standpoint, with only the interactions themselves as sources of intelligibility and meaning. In Shakespearean tragedy, our actions (must) explain themselves…. To say it all at once: Shakespearean tragedy displays our provisional self-determination as subjects in the world — while at the same time asking us to see our actions as intelligible, as somehow meaningful, as something more than the vanity of “so-and-so” doing “this-or-that.” The loss of “givens” (the death of old gods, the devaluation of our highest values) that Shakespeare “works through” does not leave us with a desperate nihilism — but rather with the sense that it is precisely this loss of “givens” that, finally, allows us to see ourselves as provisionally free in the world, and as reckoning with the implications of this new self-understanding….

[1] Having said this, I must quickly add that I am not concerned with establishing which play is the “first” Shakespearean tragedy, any more than I would want to fix a precise date or origin for painting on canvas, or for orchestra music. Such matters are subject to debate, and we can change our minds about the particulars. The larger point is that every artistic medium emerges historically — it was not always “there” — and unfolds through a certain historical development that can be examined. Which means the point of “changing our mind” about the particulars, or dates, would be the new historical-self-understanding such a change of mind would amount to (and not just a different chronology).

[2] By “indispensable,” I mean that we need Shakespeare’s work, especially, in order to understand later developments in the “art of Shakespearean tragedy.” Though I do not have the space here to discuss what might be called the history of Shakespearean tragedy since Shakespeare, I would note that Friedrich Schlegel and Goethe — like many German romantics — saw modern drama, the novel and romantic literature as developments of Shakespearean drama; just as Jan Kott saw Beckett’s work as traversing the terrain of King Lear ; just as Stanley Cavell sees Hollywood comedies of remarriage as extending Shakespearean romance — a suggestion that is being developed by Sarah Beckwith in her recent work on The Winter’s Tale and its inheritors. [To say nothing of the New York Times , in which one reads recently, “Haven’t you heard TV is the new Shakespeare?”] My suggestion, at any rate, is that we regard Shakespearean tragedy as inaugurating an artistic form whose possibilities have been explored by other artists in Shakespeare’s wake — from Ibsen and Beckett, to Sarah Kane and Pedro Almodovar and on and on — though obviously one can regard Shakespeare as a “master” of the form. [See Charles Isherwood, The New York Times , “Too Much Shakespeare? Be Not Cowed,” 12 September 2013.]

Paul A. Kottman

Associate Professor of Literary Studies at The New School for Social Research.

2 thoughts on “ What is Shakespearean Tragedy? ”

One feature of at least some tragedies (it’s been said) is that the protagonist learns something from the catastrophe undergone. Although there are some odd anachronisms in Shakespeare (I seem to recall a clock in one of the Roman plays), he seems to be alert to the insights likely to be gained by a person living under a particular so-to-speak spiritual dispensation. So, for example, Lear says “the ripeness is all”; in his Britain there is no Christianity but there is a trace of Aristotelianism. The Christian prince, Hamlet, says “the readiness is all.” Exactly the thing one might learn from death, if one is a Christian.

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