posted on 04 Nov 2024

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art by Rhodri Lewis

Stepping into the already crowded arena of Shakespeare studies must be a daunting task. Taking on an analysis of what Shakespeare was attempting to achieve with his run of 10 tragedies requires not just a knowledge of the plays and the theories and speculations of all those critics and commentators who went before but also a robust hypothesis that brings something new to the table. Rhodri Lewis, a lecturer in English at Princeton University, manages to pull off this herculean task with some aplomb.

Lewis isn’t new to analysing Shakespearean tragedy because his book, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, was published back in 2018. And, in many ways, this seems to be Lewis’s starting point because from the outset he expresses himself not quite satisfied with that earlier text; somehow, he says, he felt that his key messages didn’t quite get through clearly enough. So, by expanding his scope to include all of the major tragedies, he hopes to have another stab at defining what he sees as the essential core of what Shakespeare intended with these works.

Whilst the first part of the book deals with what might be called the historical development of the arguments about what features signify a work as a ‘tragedy’, Lewis is upfront in saying that he believes Shakespeare wasn’t interested in following any template for what constitutes the tragic. Shakespeare, he argues, was primarily interested in the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of existence – and that doesn’t follow a formula. The plays, he contends, are essentially ‘experiments’ – attempts to capture in dramatic form some of the ways that this unpredictable reality plays itself out in people’s lives.

Lewis is also insistent that the plays have to be treated as artistic wholes – wholes that incorporate other cultural and intellectual ideas such as history, philosophy, theology and politics and that we, as readers, can engage with those ideas through the drama without disaggregating them from the artistic totality. The rise of humanist thinking and ideas, Lewis suggests, also has to be factored in to any reading of the tragedies if Shakespeare’s interpretations of the human condition are to be understood. Lewis puts it succinctly when he says:

 “Shakespeare makes the case…for tragedy as the best and perhaps only medium through which one might discern what it is to be human.”

What follows this opening third of the book is a play-by-play examination of the texts and this allows Lewis to incorporate work he’d previously done on both Hamlet and Anthony and Cleopatra (which is, incidentally, my personal favourite Shakespearean tragedy). 

 I’m not going to suggest that the analysis is light reading - it isn’t and you wouldn’t expect it to be - however, it is always engaging and perhaps even sometimes provocative and Lewis always works his arguments through thoroughly and makes it possible to see how he’s arrived at his views.

So, if Shakespeare’s tragedies aren’t bound together by form, is there any justification in thinking of them as a ‘family’? In the conclusion I think Lewis sums up much of the thrust of his argument that is so well articulated throughout:

“What binds the plays together as a family, if not a genre or subgenre of their own, is their author’s preoccupation with tragic plotting. Specifically, his preoccupation with how best to devise tragic plots that operate as a principle of aesthetic order while simultaneously reflecting the disorder, the contingency and happenstance and extra-ordinariness, that are fundamental to the human experience as Shakespeare apprehended it.”

This book is a must for anyone interested in studying Shakespeare in any depth and was, for someone like me who was raised on quite formal Aristotelean interpretations of the tragedies, a new way of seeing plays I hold dearly.

Available now from Princeton University Press, you will be able to get a copy from our local independent bookshop – who will, of course, be happy to order it for you if they don’t have it on their shelves.

 

Terry Potter

November 2024