Shakespearean tragedy Flashcards
(Chaucer’s definition of Tragedy) defines the inescapable trajectory of the tragic action but not its cause, and in its reticence about who or what is responsible for the dire change of fortune it speaks tragedy’s fearful incomprehensibility.
A key aspect of Othello is the hero’s attempts to find the cause of his misfortune, and place blame and responsibility. When lago tricks Othello into believing Desdemona has been unfaithful to him, it causes Othello to blame her for his increasing insecurities. His repetition of the cause highlights his desperate need to find a sense of reason in what Kastan calls the ‘incomprehensibility of the play’s tragic world.
Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering, and as he writes in that mode the successive plays reveal an ever more profound formal acknowledgment of their desolating controlling logic.
This idea of controlling logic’ could be applied to the character of lago. He acts as a sort of puppetmaster throughout the play, toying with the emotions of characters and playing them against each other. In this way, lago can be seen to reflect Kastan’s idea of the tragic world of the play as a whole: he controls the action and disrupts the order.
Kastan questions the reasons for intolerable suffering, whether it is the tragic motor human error or capricious fate
Fate is an important aspect that leads to the tragic downfall of Othello. (the dropping of the handkerchief)
Kastan also mentioned that “ In its very simplicity it calls attention to tragedy’s power, marking it as universal and inexplicable.”
the critics draw attention to the fact that Shakespeare’s plays could apply to any of us, and we could easily find ourselves in a similar position to Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, thus making it much easier to sympathise with their plight.
By using the metaphor of ‘the green-eyed monster’ for jealousy, lago highlights that the emotion is not just specific to Othello. It is external and universal, and anyone and everyone is susceptible to it.
the pleasure of tragedy: Kastan- “It (tragedy’s power) defines the inescapable trajectory of the tragic action but not its cause, and in its reticence about who or what is responsible for the dire change of fortune it speaks tragedy’s fearful incomprehensibility”
Rymer declared the “defect” of Othello was that it did not have a moral lesson, he suggested that Othello might serve only as a “caution” to maidens not to run away with “blackamoors” without their parents’ consent. Rymer was as dismissive of the implausible characters as the plot, Othello was a “Jealous Booby”, Iago was too villainous to be believed, and Desdemona was a woman without sense as she was married to a “blackamoor”.
disagree
it would not be surprising if an audience inwardly driven by envy were to delight in the fall of one greater than they.
Nuttall notes that perhaps audiences gain pleasure from the tragic hero’s downfall, because we are jealous of their high status, and enjoy watching them fall down to the level of the common man, or even further. This is arguably true of lago in Othello. One of the reasons that lago seeks to destroy Othello is that Othello once overlooked him for a promotion,
A later kind of moralism taught a new generation of readers and theatre-goers to despise the pleasurable and to value the disturbing, the jagged, the painful work.
There is tone of resignation and acceptance in Othello’s dying words. The acts of kissing and killing are repeated on each line, creating a symmetry to the rhyming couplet, as though his suicide is a neat and fitting end to his life. All of this detracts from Nuttall’s idea that the play is ‘disturbing, jagged, and painful’. It instead implies that this is what Othello wants, and creates a sense of relief. Although there is a cathartic sense of relief at the end of the play, the emotional tension and distress throughout the body of the play does support Nuttall’s critical viewpoint.
pleasure of tragedy: Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the questions about the cause of the pain and loss the plays so agonisingly portray, and in the refusal of any answers prevent any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering.
… but the plays inevitably renders the preliminary understanding inadequate, and the characters struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old - uncertainty is the point for Shakespeare
AC Bradley
1. “and may speak of the tragic story as being concerned primarily with one person”
- He argues that Shakespeare tragedy necessarily centres on a character of high rank and exceptional qualities who undergoes a reversal of fortune that leads to his own death and to a more general calamity.
- rebuttal as Iago is greatly focused too
- agree - tragic downfall “it is essentially a tale of suffering and calamity”.
“The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person… They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory.”
Tragedy with Shakespeare is concerned always persons of “high degree”; often with kings or princes…
“It made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name.”
emphasises the role of fate
-the handkerchief
-the storm
“… the consciousness of his high position never leaves him”
-Bradley
aware of his reputation
considers his murder as an honorable act
“an honorable murder” “I have done the state some service”
To the medieval mind a tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play… A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who ‘stood in high degree’, happy and apparently secure - such was the tragic fact to the medieval mind.
A big aspect of medieval tragedy which is important to note is the concept of the wheel of fortune. This wheel would spin at random to deliver either misfortune or fortune to characters of medieval tragedy. It highlighted the random and disordered nature of fate. Elements of the wheel of fortune and its chaotic nature can be seen in the works of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and even in his own tragedies.
it is only in the love-tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest, including Macbeth, are single stars.
Bradley here notes that the vast majority of Shakespeare’s tragedies feature only a single hero. While Othello is, without doubt, the leading protagonist of Othello, Bradley’s critical viewpoint fails to take into account the role that Desdemona plays in Othello’s tragic downfall. Thus, though Desdemona may not be ‘the centre of the action’, as Bradley calls it, she is central to Othello’s tragic downfall. It is because he thinks he has already lost her that he eventually kills both her and himself.
