How to Read Shakespeare, Part 4: Tragedy

Enter the Emotion Machine

Think of some of the more serious films you’ve watched, movies wherein suffering, fear, adversity, or sadness feature prominently.

Have a few in your mind? Now ask two questions of them.

1. In how many of them is the suffering or adversity caused by the main character?

2. And how many of them end without redemption of any sort?

Chances are most of us were thinking of movies that did not meet both requirements. And that means that, classically speaking, these films are not tragedies.

(warning: spoilers forthcoming)

Examine the second question further. How many films end in calamity for the protagonist without any redemption whatsoever? I’ve asked this questions at conference presentations and in classrooms many times. And we get close. Breaking Bad is a slow descent into inhumane survivalism, but it ends with an ever-so-subtle act of self-sacrifice.

Or take a classic like Dead Poets Society. Near the end, a student of Mr. Keating’s takes his own life. But the story doesn’t quite end there. The student’s death is followed by the society betraying Mr. Keating and then, like prodigals, publicly voicing their support of him (“O Captain! My Captain!”). Or … really dating myself here … the blockbuster, Titanic. Yes, Jack floats down into his watery grave but only in an act of sacrifice for the life of Rose. And the two reunite in Rose’s dream at the Grand Staircase of the ship.

Even the slightest spark of grace or redemption disqualifies a story as a classical tragedy. I think of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. So many of them surround people and society’s that are lost in so many ways, but even as the “Misfit” is about to pull the trigger to take the life of the Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” they share a split second of mutual understand.

Something about modern society resists ending a story in decisive catastrophe or loss. It’s not because we simply don’t have the emotional stomach for it. Rather, it’s because the story wouldn’t make sense to us. We witness irredeemable tragedy all of the time, but not in the form of stories.

Genres are sense-making frameworks. They present the cause-and-effect of actions in ways that align with our received beliefs about how consequences follow events. Which is to say, they reflect culture back to us.

Tragedy comes from a different world.

Shakespeare inherited a form of tragedy from ancient societies that made sense of events in significantly different ways than we do today. One of these differences is the role of public life versus the role of the individual. Today, we think have a Romantic view of the individual where the deepest meaning of life is realized for oneself. Just think of all of the forms of individualism that have existed since the middle of the 19th Century. But in ancient Athens, by contrast, the society that gave birth to tragic drama, it was in public life where one’s highest meaning could be realized. Highest virtue and highest freedom were only possible when (and if) one was involved in the governance of the city or polis.

For this reason, the classical form of tragedy views the public good as always greater than the individual good. And the suffering that individuals experience is always justified by some benefit for the city, even if that benefit is non-material, for instance simply coming to a better understanding of the public good.

Sophocles’s Antigone offers an illustration of this. Antigone has to choose between loyalty to her brother (which amounts to piety before the gods) and loyalty to her city. We view her as having an impossible decision to make. And when she chooses filial piety and suffers a tragic death for it, we feel the injustice of the situation. But, in fact, the Greeks would not have viewed her as blameless. Even though both options require disloyalty to one of her obligations, she is culpable for her decision to break the laws of her city. If you’ve read the play, you might contest, But even Creon, the king, regrets the harshness of his actions that contributed to Antigone’s death! Still, Antigone was also to blame. In the Greek mind, it wasn’t one or the other, and in actuality it was Creon’s predicament rather than Antigone’s that would have seemed the more agonizing.

If this doesn’t make much sense to us, that’s because we’re moderns. And that’s just one example of the differences between the ancient world that invented tragic drama and the modern world — public vs. the individual. They also held different understandings of religious devotion, of virtue, of the soul, and of happiness.

The emotion machine

By the time Shakespeare got his hands on tragic drama, it had gone through many iterations — in particular through Roman tragedy and through the sensationalist tragic plays of commercial theater in the decades before Shakespeare began making plays.

But in general, the genre was still understood within Aristotle’s paradigm as laid out in his work, Poetics. The Poetics was rediscovered at the end of the middle ages, a couple generations before Shakespeare was born, but many of its principles of reversal, tragic mistake, catharsis, and recognition persisted throughout the middle ages through other nondramatic forms of poetry and even in church liturgy.

In the Poetics, Aristotle defined tragedy as “an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude … through pity and fear effecting the proper katharsis of these emotions.” There is a lot packed into this simple definition, so I’ll offer my own summary of classical tragedy.

Tragedy was an emotion machine. I mean, it was a way of organizing events and characters so as to produce a certain idealized emotion. Aristotle calls this katharsis, a notoriously difficult word to translate. Many of us were taught that his means “purgation,” but it could also mean “clarification” or “correction.” But in essence, katharsis is an emotion-driven experience that the audience has that aims to shape the behavior of their feelings (or passions) in a way that is suitable to the greater good of the city.

That’s a mouthful. I’ll simplify more.

A protagonist is forced to make a tough decision, but without knowing it, they slightly miss the mark (hamartia). Circumstances begin to decline but hit a real turning point (reversal, or peripeteia) when the protagonist at last realizes (recognition, or anagnorisis) that their misfortune is actually their own fault. It’s too late, and catastrophe cannot be avoided.

Each of these parts — missing the mark, reversal, recognition, and catastrophe — have to be balanced and unified in such a way that the audience feels optimum pity and fear. We pity the character because their error wasn’t so bad and doesn’t warrant such suffering. And we fear because, despite the measure of bad luck that contributed to the tragedy, we can still trace the catastrophe back to their mistake.

As Aristotle approaches it, the proper ordering of tragedy is not a rule as much as a recipe. The success of a play and the virtue of its plot are judged by the power of its catharsis. An imbalanced play will either make us feel disgust (as when an innocent person suffers irrationally) or a sense of justice (as when a clearly guilty person suffers the expected consequences of their actions).

Shakespearean Tragedy

Tragedy is an imitation of action, not of people or ideas. That means that the engine that powers it is the logic whereby one understands the way consequences proceed from actions. But societies across history understood the cause-and-effect of human actions differently. They had different moral logics.

When Shakespeare came on the scene, roughly 2,000 years after Aristotle wrote about his contemporary tragedians, a lot had changed. Christianity became the dominant religion of the west. Europe was in the midst of the Scientific Revolution. Societies had started the process of becoming secular in their institutions of state, education, and commerce. So we can think of Shakespeare as making tragic plays in the last decades when tragic drama had its sense-making power.

So Shakespeare’s tragedies have a strained quality to them.

Take Romeo & Juliet. There are two protagonists. They act out of romantic love with little to no consideration of the public good. That would have been unthinkable in ancient times. And how exactly are they to be blamed for their suffering? Acting with too much haste? …Maybe. Defying the rules of their families? …That’s a more likely candidate, early modern Verona, where the play is set, is defined by a family feud. And we the audience are conditioned by Shakespeare to root for the lovers even against their families. What, in the end, is clarified for us? How do we view the individual’s responsibility differently? What wayward emotions are clarified or corrected in us? If anything, we feel a sense of poetic injustice!

Or take King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. It pits worldview against worldview — the machiavellian survival-of-the-fittest against ideals of honor and piety. And neither is so much proved the better in the end. How would we even judge this?

I’m haunted by the recognition scene at the end. Recognition is arguably the most important component in the emotion machine of tragedy. It is how we, the audience, receive clarity on which actions are commended and which condemned. But by the time Lear is reunited with his good daughter, Cordelia, whom he betrayed early on, Lear has suffered so much suffering that he is incapable of truly seeing her.

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
 Methinks I should know you and know this man,
 Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is, and all the skill I have
 Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
 Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,
 For, as I am a man, I think this lady
 To be my child Cordelia.

The events of the play have robbed him — and therefore have robbed us — of a clear-eyed recognition. Even at Cordelia’s death, Lear believes she lives. He holds a feather to her mouth and falsely detects breath. What can we say about this recognition scene besides that it is unimaginably sad?

A similar interrupted recognition affects the end of Othello, as Desdemona (whom Othello has just smothered) repeatedly partially resuscitates only to die as Othello realizes his mistake — that he’s been deceived by a character of pure evil, Iago. There’s no subtle conflict of competing obligations in this play. Like the serpent in the garden, there’s heavy-handed deception and its victim.

How to find the tragic form

Despite Shakespeare’s deviations from the traditional tragic mode, they are still deviations from a norm, exceptions to a rule. And when we read Richard III, Hamlet, King Lear, Titus Andronicus (I won’t even begin to discuss this one!), Macbeth, and Shakespeare’s other tragic plays, we will get more out of them if we attend to the basic tragic structure.

Recognition

My recommendation is to begin by identifying the moment of recognition and then working backwards from there. Where does the protagonist discover the full picture? And what exactly do they come to believe about it? Is it by natural or extraordinary circumstances that they come to full knowledge? Do they blame themselves, or do they curse the world? Does their moment of recognition coincide with the turn from fortune to misfortune? Sometimes recognition, mistake, and reversal actually coincide with one another in the same act. Those are Aristotle’s favorite kinds of tragedy.

Mistake

What sort of mistake does the protagonist make? Is it one of personal vice, like pride or jealousy? Or is it an error of understanding? Or is it more circumstantial than that? Do we, perhaps, have a difficult time finding them culpable for anything at all? How, if at all, could they have avoided the error they made? And does the recognition clearly point us back to the error? If it doesn’t, what does it point us to?

Reversal

When do things really go awry? Think of reversal like the snowball effect. A small snowball is set into motion, but before you know it it’s an enormous snow boulder hurtling toward … Toward what? Toward the society? Toward an individual? Toward hoped-for love?

Catastrophe

One of the things I love about Shakespeare’s tragedies is that they rarely, if at all, end with even the slightest hint of redemption. Horatio leans over the body of Hamlet and prays,

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Such a beautiful ending. But remember the line just before consists of four resonating bellows from Hamlet, “O, O, O, O!” These are the cries of unmitigated loss, the death of his mother, the suicide of his beloved. And where is the Ghost of his father to say, well done?

While it’s a strange comment to make — that I love the lack of redemption at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedies — I make it with appreciation for the kind of experience the audience can have when we give permission for tragedy to run its course.

Students are gearing up for the next Incubation Lab workshop. These are public events open to anyone who registers (here).

This workshop is on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

As our students study this topic, they tell me that they’ve been surprised at what constitutes an MVP. It doesn’t have to be the thing that you ultimately want to build. In fact, it rarely is. An MVP is often something that draws people in, that requires only minimal commitment on the part of the customer, and that in a small but significant way fulfills the mission of the business or organization.

Identifying what the MVP for your idea is can be energizing and can act as a catalyst for development and growth. It takes understanding and skill to see in the first place that there’s something there that works. Once you recognize that, the next steps become clearer.

We’ve designed these Incubation Lab workshops both as events that community members can attend if they’ve been thinking about or working on an idea for a product, program, or service. But they’re also for seasoned professionals, folks working in an industry who want to return to the fundamentals.

This is the last one of the year. And I hope to see some readers there! Message me if you want to hear more about it.