Shakespearean tragedy

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Shakespearean tragedy stands as one of the most debated and dissected categories in all of literary history. William Shakespeare wrote the plays we call his tragedies across roughly two decades, and scholars have spent centuries arguing about which titles belong in that category at all. The question of what counts as a Shakespearean tragedy turns out to be far thornier than it might seem. How do you classify a play built on real English history? What do you do with a story that begins in darkness but somehow ends in relief? And what happens when a work simply refuses to fit any box at all? Those questions will take us through the sources Shakespeare drew on, the theatrical world he inhabited, and the ancient ideas about fate and flaw that shaped every catastrophe he put on stage.

• 2. The Classification Problem

  ›

  In the First Folio, the collected works published after Shakespeare's death, his plays were sorted into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The editors placed the history plays separately from the tragedies even though many of those histories share the hallmarks of tragic drama. The reason was origin: history plays were grounded in the real kings and nobles of England, and that national identity seemed to demand its own shelf.

  The Roman plays complicated the picture immediately. Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus are also drawn from historical figures, but because their sources were foreign and ancient, they almost always land in the tragedy column rather than the history column. Geography and era, not the shape of the story, determined where they went.

  Shakespeare's romances, his tragicomic late plays, were published in the original folios as either tragedy or comedy depending on the play. They feature a high-status central character in serious peril, which looks like tragedy, yet they resolve happily, which looks like comedy. They occupy a genuinely ambiguous middle ground.

  Almost three centuries after Shakespeare's death, the English scholar Frederick S. Boas introduced a fourth term to handle what nothing else could: the problem play. That label was coined for works whose subject matter, setting, or ending refuses to settle neatly into any single genre. Scholars continue to disagree on how to categorize several of Shakespeare's plays even today.

• 3. Sources and Borrowings

  ›

  Shakespeare wrote the majority of his tragedies under the rule of James I, and the darker textures of those plays may reflect both the mood of England after the death of Elizabeth I and the theatrical preferences of the new king. The English Renaissance was itself fueled by a renewed appetite for Roman and Greek classics, alongside the renaissance literature already circulating from Italy, France, and Spain.

  In Elizabethan England there was no copyright law and no protection against plagiarism. Characters, plots, and even whole phrases of poetry were treated as common property. Shakespeare and his contemporaries all worked this way; borrowing was not a scandal but standard practice.

  For the Roman plays, Shakespeare drew heavily on Plutarch's The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans. For his Britain-based plays and for Hamlet, the primary source was Holinshed's Chronicles. Hamlet specifically traces its roots to the Danish Prince Amleth, and the French author Belleforest had already published The Hystorie of Hamblet, Prince of Denmarke in 1582. That earlier text included details as specific as the prince feigning madness and the scene in which the prince kills the king's counsellor who was eavesdropping from behind an arras in the queen's chamber.

  The story of Lear has an even longer paper trail. It appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regium Britanniae around 1135, then in John Higgins's poem The Mirror for Magistrates in 1574, and again in Holinshed's Chronicles in 1587. Certain episodes in King Lear draw from Philip Sidney's Arcadia of 1590, while the nonsensical speech of Edgar's character Poor Tom leans heavily on Samuel Harsnett's 1603 book, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures.

  Not every tragedy reached Shakespeare through history. Othello and Measure for Measure are based on narrative fictions by the Italian writer Giraldi Cintio, making them the notable exceptions in a body of work otherwise anchored in historical record.

• 4. Tragic Form and Philosophy

  ›

  The philosophical backbone of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy ran back to Senecan drama, the Roman theatrical tradition that gave the era its template for catastrophe. That template centered on noble figures who carry a tragic flaw or commit a grave error, known by the Greek term hamartia. That flaw or error sets in motion a reversal of fortune, or peripeteia, that destroys them.

  Some critics, however, have argued that this so-called pseudo-Aristotelian concept of the tragic flaw does not map cleanly onto Shakespeare's protagonists. The argument is not settled. Revenge tragedy was another prominent strain of the era, and Hamlet is its most famous example in Shakespeare's canon.

  One quality that separated English renaissance tragedy from its classical predecessors was the staging of violence and murder directly before the audience. Greek and Roman drama kept such acts offstage; Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights put them in full view, and audiences responded to that immediacy.

  These plays were also strikingly secular. The religious morality plays that had dominated English drama earlier were outlawed by Elizabeth I, which cleared the stage for a kind of tragedy that located its causes in human character and political power rather than divine judgment. Revenge tragedy and the broader tragic form filled that vacancy, and works by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford all explored its possibilities alongside Shakespeare.

• 5. A Chronology of Catastrophe

  ›

  Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's earliest entry in the tragedy column, was written somewhere in the range of 1591-1593. Romeo and Juliet followed in the mid-1590s. By around 1599-1600, Julius Caesar had arrived, and then Hamlet a year or two later.

  The decade from roughly 1601 to 1608 was the most concentrated period of tragic output. Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus all emerged in that span. That clustering under James I, whose reign began in 1603, supports the argument that the political atmosphere and the king's own theatrical tastes shaped what Shakespeare chose to write.

  The dates attached to each play are ranges, not fixed points, because the evidence available to scholars is rarely precise enough to pin a play to a single year. Each estimated window represents the best scholarly consensus from surviving records, publication dates, and references in contemporary documents. The range for Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, runs 1606-1607, with the terminus post quem marking the earliest possible date and the terminus ante quem marking the latest. That attention to what can and cannot be known with certainty is itself a characteristic of how scholars approach the entire category of Shakespearean tragedy.