Shakespeare's Tragic Art

Just as other dramatic genres come strikingly alive in Shakespeare, tragedy seems to acquire in his plays a particularly enduring force. Readers have long recognized this power, but what remains elusive is how Shakespearean tragedy operates and what has enabled it to exert such lasting influence on literary and esthetic cultures. Indeed, the very words play and tragedy inevitably evoke Shakespeare. It is this enduring power that Rhodri Lewis's Shakespeare's Tragic Art explores. Lewis begins by asking what tragedy means in classical literature and how Shakespeare draws on and departs from it. He then offers an expansive account of how Shakespeare's tragedies have been received and interpreted over time. Lewis thus reveals the distinctive qualities of Shakespearean tragedy, particularly the ways in which it illuminates the contingencies of human experience “in a world not susceptible to rational analysis” (2). One of the distinctive features of Shakespeare is his ability to give form to what resists expression. His language enables moments of silence, arrest, gesture, and rupture to disclose what resists articulation. Shakespeare thus does more than simply represent tragedy through language; he makes language itself responsive to what exceeds articulation. Lewis returns to this distinctive feature throughout his study. Lewis argues that although Shakespeare's later tragedies represent a significant development, the early tragic plays already contain his brilliance in “embryonic form” (62). Lewis's attention is especially noteworthy given the relatively marginal place that tragedy occupies in histories of drama, which tend to focus disproportionately on comedy. Only about one-third of Shakespeare's plays are tragedies. By beginning with these early works, Lewis traces the development of Shakespeare's tragic art and challenges the tendency to locate his achievement primarily in his mature tragedies.