Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
battles,--a narrative which would have won much less attention if it had
opened the play.
When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes
people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out
of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes
with anxiety. On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet
conversation, this is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters
and takes action of some decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less
like the beginning of _Macbeth_ than that of _King Lear_. The tone is
pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund
is written in prose. But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by
the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds
to his fatal division of the kingdom.
This tragedy illustrates another practice of Shakespeare's. _King Lear_
has a secondary plot, that which concerns Gloster and his two sons. To
make the beginning of this plot quite clear, and to mark it off from the
main action, Shakespeare gives it a separate exposition. The great scene
of the division of Britain and the rejection of Cordelia and Kent is
followed by the second scene, in which Gloster and his two sons appear
alone, and the beginning of Edmund's design is disclosed. In _Hamlet_,
though the plot is single, there is a little group of characters
possessing a certain independent interest,--Polonius, his son, and his
daughter; and so the third scene is devoted wholly to them. And again,
in _Othello_, since Roderigo is to occupy a peculiar position almost
throughout the action, he is introduced at once, alone with Iago, and
his position is explained before the other characters are allowed to
appear.
But why should Iago open the play? Or, if this seems too presumptuous a
question, let us put it in the form, What is the effect of his opening
the play? It is that we receive at the very outset a strong impression
of the force which is to prove fatal to the hero's happiness, so that,
when we see the hero himself, the shadow of fate already rests upon him.
And an effect of this kind is to be noticed in other tragedies. We are
made conscious at once of some power which is to influence the whole
action to the hero's undoing. In _Macbeth_ we see and hear the Witches,
in _Hamlet_ the Ghost. In the first scene of _Julius Caesar_ and of
_Coriolanus_ those qualities of the crowd are vividly shown which render
hopeless the enterprise of the one hero and wreck the ambition of the
other. It is the same with the hatred between the rival houses in _Romeo
and Juliet_, and with Antony's infatuated passion. We realise them at
the end of the first page, and are almost ready to regard the hero as
doomed. Often, again, at one or more points during the exposition this
feeling is reinforced by some expression that has an ominous effect. The
first words we hear from Macbeth, 'So foul and fair a day I have not
seen,' echo, though he knows it not, the last words we heard from the
Witches, 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair.' Romeo, on his way with his
friends to the banquet, where he is to see Juliet for the first time,
tells Mercutio that he has had a dream. What the dream was we never
learn, for Mercutio does not care to know, and breaks into his speech
about Queen Mab; but we can guess its nature from Romeo's last speech in
the scene:
My mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels.
When Brabantio, forced to acquiesce in his daughter's stolen marriage,
turns, as he leaves the council-chamber, to Othello, with the warning,
Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see;
She has deceived her father, and may thee,
this warning, and no less Othello's answer, 'My life upon her faith,'
make our hearts sink. The whole of the coming story seems to be
prefigured in Antony's muttered words (I. ii. 120):
These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
Or lose myself in dotage;
and, again, in Hamlet's weary sigh, following so soon on the passionate
resolution stirred by the message of the Ghost:
The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right.
These words occur at a point (the end of the First Act) which may be
held to fall either within the exposition or beyond it. I should take
the former view, though such questions, as we saw at starting, can
hardly be decided with certainty. The dimensions of this first section
of a tragedy depend on a variety of causes, of which the chief seems to
be the comparative simplicity or complexity of the situation from which
the conflict arises. Where this is simple the exposition is short, as in
_Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_. Where it is complicated the exposition
requires more space, as in _Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, and _King
Lear_. Its completion is generally marked in the mind of the reader by a
feeling that the action it contains is for the moment complete but has
left a problem. The lovers have met, but their families are at deadly
enmity; the hero seems at the height of success, but has admitted the
thought of murdering his sovereign; the old king has divided his kingdom
between two hypocritical daughters, and has rejected his true child; the
hero has acknowledged a sacred duty of revenge, but is weary of life:
and we ask, What will come of this? Sometimes, I may add, a certain time
is supposed to elapse before the events which answer our question make
their appearance and the conflict begins; in _King Lear_, for instance,
about a fortnight; in _Hamlet_ about two months.
2
We come now to the conflict itself. And here one or two preliminary
remarks are necessary. In the first place, it must be remembered that
our point of view in examining the construction of a play will not
always coincide with that which we occupy in thinking of its whole
dramatic effect. For example, that struggle in the hero's soul which
sometimes accompanies the outward struggle is of the highest importance
for the total effect of a tragedy; but it is not always necessary or
desirable to consider it when the question is merely one of
construction. And this is natural. The play is meant primarily for the
theatre; and theatrically the outward conflict, with its influence on
the fortunes of the hero, is the aspect which first catches, if it does
not engross, attention. For the average play-goer of every period the
main interest of _Hamlet_ has probably lain in the vicissitudes of his
long duel with the King; and the question, one may almost say, has been
which will first kill the other. And so, from the point of view of
construction, the fact that Hamlet spares the King when he finds him
praying, is, from its effect on the hero's fortunes, of great moment;
but the cause of the fact, which lies within Hamlet's character, is not
so.
In the second place we must be prepared to find that, as the plays vary
so much, no single way of regarding the conflict will answer precisely
to the construction of all; that it sometimes appears possible to look
at the construction of a tragedy in two quite different ways, and that
it is material to find the best of the two; and that thus, in any given
instance, it is necessary first to define the opposing sides in the
conflict. I will give one or two examples. In some tragedies, as we saw
in our first lecture, the opposing forces can, for practical purposes,
be identified with opposing persons or groups. So it is in _Romeo and
Juliet_ and _Macbeth_. But it is not always so. The love of Othello may
be said to contend with another force, as the love of Romeo does; but
Othello cannot be said to contend with Iago as Romeo contends with the
representatives of the hatred of the houses, or as Macbeth contends with
Malcolm and Macduff. Again, in _Macbeth_ the hero, however much
influenced by others, supplies the main driving power of the action; but
in _King Lear_ he does not. Possibly, therefore, the conflict, and with
it the construction, may best be regarded from different points of view
in these two plays, in spite of the fact that the hero is the central
figure in each. But if we do not observe this we shall attempt to find
the same scheme in both, and shall either be driven to some unnatural
view or to a sceptical despair of perceiving any principle of
construction at all.
With these warnings, I turn to the question whether we can trace any
distinct method or methods by which Shakespeare represents the rise and
development of the conflict.
(1) One at least is obvious, and indeed it is followed not merely during
the conflict but from beginning to end of the play. There are, of
course, in the action certain places where the tension in the minds of
the audience becomes extreme. We shall consider these presently. But, in
addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of
rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a
regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections. Some kind
of variation of pitch is to be found, of course, in all drama, for it
rests on the elementary facts that relief must be given after emotional
strain, and that contrast is required to bring out the full force of an
effect. But a good drama of our own time shows nothing approaching to
the _regularity_ with which in the plays of Shakespeare and of his
contemporaries the principle is applied. And the main cause of this
difference lies simply in a change of theatrical arrangements. In
Shakespeare's theatre, as there was no scenery, scene followed scene
with scarcely any pause; and so the readiest, though not the only, way
to vary the emotional pitch was to interpose a whole scene where the
tension was low between scenes where it was high. In our theatres there
is a great deal of scenery, which takes a long time to set and change;
and therefore the number of scenes is small, and the variations of
tension have to be provided within the scenes, and still more by the
pauses between them. With Shakespeare there are, of course, in any long
scene variations of tension, but the scenes are numerous and, compared
with ours, usually short, and variety is given principally by their
difference in pitch.
It may further be observed that, in a portion of the play which is
relatively unexciting, the scenes of lower tension may be as long as
those of higher; while in a portion of the play which is specially
exciting the scenes of low tension are shorter, often much shorter, than
the others. The reader may verify this statement by comparing the First
or the Fourth Act in most of the tragedies with the Third; for, speaking
very roughly, we may say that the First and Fourth are relatively quiet
acts, the Third highly critical. A good example is the Third Act of
_King Lear_, where the scenes of high tension (ii., iv., vi.) are
respectively 95, 186 and 122 lines in length, while those of low tension
(i., iii., v.) are respectively 55, 26 and 26 lines long. Scene vii.,
the last of the Act, is, I may add, a very exciting scene, though it
follows scene vi., and therefore the tone of scene vi. is greatly
lowered during its final thirty lines.
(2) If we turn now from the differences of tension to the sequence of
events within the conflict, we shall find the principle of alternation
at work again in another and a quite independent way. Let us for the
sake of brevity call the two sides in the conflict A and B. Now,
usually, as we shall see presently, through a considerable part of the
play, perhaps the first half, the cause of A is, on the whole,
advancing; and through the remaining part it is retiring, while that of