Shakespeare’s Tragedy

We use the word tragedy commonly and rather loosely to mean a disaster of some sort, an accident that has befallen someone inexplicably, a calamity, a misfortune. The word, though, has a more precise meaning in the study of literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the renowned British scholar A. C. Bradley gave a series of lectures on four major plays of Shakespeare, which were later published together as Shakespearean Tragedy. In his first chapter, he wrote this beautiful passage which is not only instructive about the literary meaning of tragedy, but illuminating as a piece of masterfully constructed writing as well:

A Shakespearean tragedy…may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man, descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly from actions, and those the actions of men.

It is best to read that passage aloud a few times and try to sense the weight of the sentences; they are heavy, but not ponderous, serious, but not severe. They have a balance in their construction, and that seems to be what it is that produces the measured, meaningful rhythm we perceive in it. And if that is the case, the question we should have as close readers is, how? How has the writer configured his sentences such that this impression of thoughtful cadence holds our attention as the meaning unfolds?

What typifies the construction of this passage more than anything else, I think, is what we could call its control of complexity. Beginning with the third sentence, we enter a conceptual world involved enough to require subordinated sentence structures, antitheses, and multiplicities to pronounce the point being made. One way to establish control is to place grammatical elements in parallel. The design of the third sentence here is named convoluted, where subordinate structures are rolled up (which is what convoluted means) between the main subject and the predicate. These elements are themselves parallel, with the preposition like building a phrase at the end of each: like lightning, like pestilence. The fourth sentence, a balanced design, hinges its two parts (almost equal in word number) with a strong semicolon. And the fifth sentence repeats the conjunction and in joining fire and the wind and the torments in order to lay out in grand array the dramatic conditions which would still not be enough to meet the definition of Shakespearean tragedy.

Now read the passage aloud again, this time trying to conform your voice to the sonorous rhythm created by these compositional structures. We cannot read this passage quickly if we wish to read it thoughtfully. And that might be a very good exercise for us to practice every now and then as our culture relies more and more on the visual. Words create mental images which the eye cannot see, and far from that being an inferior quality, it might very well be our strength, for the effort it takes to conjure and then hold the picture a sentence is framing is intellectual, where emotional effect can be tempered, if need be, by reason. And thoughtful reason just might help us forestall a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion.

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