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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A gentleman named Brabantio was once a senator in the Republic of Venice. His daughter, Desdemona, was, as fate would have it, quite beautiful, and he, of course, was quite protecting of her. One young suitor by the name of Roderigo the father had already parried away, but the desperate man called yet again on the senator at home one night, banged on his door, and yelled up to his window, asking the father whether all his family was at home. The senator lost his patience at the curious, insinuating question and yelled back from his balcony, “Why, wherefore ask you this?”

So says Shakespeare in his tragedy Othello. And that senator’s angry reply, in addition to its position in the unfolding drama, happens to stand as a gem for grammar teachers, for in the space of one brief sentence, it illustrates the difference between two logical questions in a way modern English no longer does so concisely. Both why and wherefore are adverbs, but they once had distinct purposes: to ask why means to seek the purpose of something; it looks forward, to the intended effect of an action. To ask wherefore, however, is to look back, to seek the cause of the action having transpired. The two words mark the difference between the logical notions of effect and cause. We, however, no longer use the word wherefore, and so in modern idiom, Brabantio’s retort might be phrased, What has made you ask this and what could you be after in asking me?

This distinct meaning of wherefore has collapsed into why in modern English, and so if you consult a good dictionary, you will find that the adverb why is defined now as for what cause, reason, or purpose. The cause of something points backwards, the reason for it looks either backwards and forward, and its purpose looks forward. These directions of cause and effect, once differentiated, have now been subsumed under the one word why. We will encounter the antiquated wherefore now most often in literature of a certain date. Still, it shows up sometimes where it’s not invited, inflating the prose unnecessarily. The writer Bryan Garner, who has published important reference works on English usage, particularly legal writing, advises lawyers (and by implication the rest of us) in his The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2002) to watch out for wherefore (and some thirty other words and phrases) which “drift along in legal writing like so much deadwood in a stream.” When we do see wherefore, we usually find it as a noun, meaning the explanation or answer for something, especially in the phrase the whys and wherefores, as in, for example, what could have been the whys and wherefores of his erratic behavior?

If there is anything to lament here, it is not that the language has changed; that is inevitable and a good measure better than an unbending strictness that might very well be a sign of life retreating. What is something to worry about, though, is whether we will still perceive in the one word why the two very different logical relations of cause and effect. Brabantio is not simply repeating himself for emphasis when he asks why and wherefore; that is not a dramatic intensification, as if he were asking reiteratively, why, why? Instead, the senator wants to know both the cause that has brought Roderigo to ominously interrupt him at home and the purpose the young man intends by that insolent action—an important distinction we are the poorer for not appreciating.

And poorer still if we miss it when Juliet, elsewhere, laments from her window, O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo! The beautiful and stricken Juliet is not asking where Romeo might be; she is not looking out from her balcony calling his name in an exclamation to find him (notice that there is no comma after thou to isolate his name and indicate direct address). Instead, she wants to know what it is that has caused him to be in her life. Our modern idiom might say, O Romeo, Romeo! What has made you what you are?, but we can hear that this does not capture the intricacies of his presence which she longs to live out her life with. And that is what we have to be careful about, that we retain the delicate conceptions of our awareness as the language changes. For if language loses its cognitive color, so will much of our life, whose subtleties lie hidden for us to find.

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An instructor of mine in college once admonished his class of graduate students that they all read too much. It was spring, the term almost over, and he threw down the challenge that we all should enroll in a drawing class over the summer. His judgment surprised everyone, because both the scholarship and writing of this particular teacher were of the first degree, and that achievement, we knew, had entailed a lot of reading. Wordless drawing?

There is, unquestionably, wisdom in that scholar’s advice, but there is a median way to freshen our mental habits: read about an unfamiliar subject. The point of such a diversion is not only to think about things never conceived before, but to observe closely how another author expresses those new ideas. Here, for example, is a passage from one such subject unfamiliar to many (certainly to me): sailing. Percy Blandford, in his The Art of Sailing (1972), prefaces his subject to the general reader like this:

One of the fascinating things about sailing is that you can never finish learning. It is always possible to improve your ability and technique. You cannot learn all about sailing from a book, but it is certainly possible to learn the rudiments of sailing technique and get out on a quiet piece of water and teach yourself to sail.

That passage, and the author’s style generally, has a downright quality: a simple sentence structure that carries a common diction. If not exhortative, it is encouraging, and the first three lines about what is practically possible are raised to a new level with the beautiful little phrase on a quiet piece of water. We might very well learn from that brief piece of poetry something of the writer’s relationship to his subject—a valuable insight for readers to have into the authors they are reading closely. Blandford apparently relishes all that knowledge one can never finish learning, but not at the price of doing.

Indeed, he says as much in another passage worth considering. Here we see a writer on the art of sailing saying things any serious student of the art of language has wondered about: just what is the balance between theory and practice:

It is possible to get very scientific about sailing and there are books devoted to the theoretical problems involved…, but this is a practical book and we are only concerned with how to sail, without bothering too much about the reasons behind it…. In any case the actual practice of sailing is art as much as science. The man with a feel for the wind and its actions may get better results than the man who sees every movement as a scientific problem.

Blandford has decided here not to sail directly into the wind. There are reasons behind the techniques of sailing, he acknowledges, but the emphasis of what he has to teach will be on the practice, not the study, of being on the water. Considering that passage closely, we learn how the devotee of another art has decided to negotiate the balance of theory and practice. He defines his territory (“this is a practical book”), and justifies that position by asserting the equality of acting and learning (“the actual practice of sailing is art as much as science”). And he finally tacks around the problem by rhetorically stretching necessary reasons into scientific problems.

And where would the idea of saying that Blandford decided not to sail directly into the wind come from? From my reading Blandford, of course: “No boat can sail directly towards the wind.” And maybe there’s another lesson to learn right there: that taking the difficulty of any study head-on might just blunt our efforts. Better to tack, and enrich our work by discovering fresh metaphors and new ideas from an unfamiliar world.

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It is one of the fundamentals of writing that every word must count. Consider these two sentences: the bank president hired three new people whose job was to guard the guards, and the bank president hired three new people whose job it was to guard the guards. The only difference between the two is the addition of the pronoun it in the second version. Does that violate this principle of good writing?

We should say first that both these sentences are grammatically correct, and so the choice between them is rhetorical. Nonetheless, the sentence structure and the grammar that builds it are essential to understand. Both sentences are complex, meaning they include an independent and a subordinate clause. The independent clause appears first in each (the bank president hired three new people), and so their design is called loose. (By contrast, the design of sentences that begin with the subordinate clause, which would not have been possible in this sentence, is called periodic.) The independent clause should cause little confusion: a simple subject (bank president) joined to a transitive verb (hired), followed directly by the direct object (three new people). A standard SVO (subject + verb + object) arrangement.

The subordinate clause, though, poses a degree or two of difficulty, not because either version is unusual, but because both involve a copulative verb—always a mind twister. A copula (the term derives from the Latin noun for a link or rope) identifies the subject of a clause with a noun or adjective in the predicate. Though two conceptual entities are named, as, for example, I and president in a sentence such as I am the president, the copula is asserting not action, but a logical identification of the two named entities. In language, at least, the human mind has no objection to seeing that two are one (what the philosophers discuss under the title nonduality, a similarly mind-confounding idea).

In the first version, the subject of the subordinate clause, job, is being identified with the predicate noun phrase to guard the guards. That phrase begins with the infinitive to guard, and includes the direct object of that infinitive, the guards. Infinitives may function as nouns (and elsewhere as adjectives and adverbs as well), and so we judge this first version of the subordinate clause more direct because the order of subject + copula + predicate noun is not interrupted in any way. Its structure is as straightforward as the simple example of a copula we looked at: I am the president. This word order is abbreviated SVC, where C stands for a complement, here the predicate noun president, which completes (hence, the term complement) the predication the copula is making.

Now that structure is largely the same in the second version of the subordinate clause, but here the pronoun it has been added. This use of the pronoun is called the anticipatory it, and, the odd nomenclature aside, its use is not unusual. Such statements as it’s interesting that you say he was once very poor, or it will not be easy to find another job illustrate the construction. The former means, logically, that you say he was once very poor is interesting, and the latter, to find another job will not be easy. Notice that both these logically more accurate statements also sound more formal. The anticipatory it construction, on the other hand, is used to soften the blow of saying what’s what by introducing a more discursive, conversational presentation of the ideas. This results in the displacement of the logical subject, thereby also giving it more emphasis when it finally appears where it wasn’t expected. As the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (Evans and Evans, 1957) puts it: “This is not a “weak” construction. It is a device for making the true subject more emphatic by allowing it to be taken out of its normal position.” The term true subject here means the logical subject.

That is an important observation, and it will affect the way we parse the subordinate clause of the second version. In the examples above, we can see that the “normal position” of the subjects has been reversed in arrangement: the logical, or “true” subjects (that you say he was once very poor and to find another job) appear in the predicate position when the anticipatory it construction is used. In the subordinate clause of the second version of our original example, however, the pronoun it does not reverse the position of the subject, but interrupts it. To assert whose job it was to guard the guards has the rhetorical effect of delaying the logical subject (to guard the guards) by giving the reader a pronoun still in need of—anticipating—an antecedent. Thus, the sentence is set up to keep the reader reading, and the answer to the suspense created finally arrives at the end of the clause. The pronoun then does not have its usual antecedent, but a postcedent. The first sentence of this essay is another example of the construction.

Which version to choose? That all depends on context, as is very often (if not, indeed, always) the case when we are writing as carefully as we can. The choice here is between being declarative or suspensive, black-and-white or more colorful, right-angled or curving. There is no rule to decide such things, for they lie in the order of discernment, not precept. And discernment we get only by reading and reflecting, and living.

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Jacob Needleman was an American philosopher and teacher who articulated in clear, straightforward prose the basic questions of philosophy which have preoccupied civilizations from the ancient world to the present. Among his many titles are Real Philosophy: An Anthology of Universal Search for Meaning; Money and the Meaning of Life; and The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders.

In addition to his many books and articles, Needleman once wrote a commencement address which he read to a graduating class of high school students. In it, he tells the story of being recently in Concord, Massachusetts, and visiting the site of the Old North Bridge, where American Minutemen fired the “shot heard round the world,” marking the onset of the American War of Independence. Needleman then explains to the new graduates before him the contemporary implications of that struggle:

There’s a plaque there that speaks about the love of freedom, and I asked myself, when I looked at that, “What do you love when you love freedom?” If you ask yourself that question – “I love freedom, but what is it that I love when I love freedom?”– it’s not just the freedom to buy things, to do what I want, when I want, how I want – that’s for children. But real freedom, for the Founders, and, as the country went on, for those who kept renewing the meaning of the country – people like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the keepers of the Native American tradition – freedom meant the freedom to live one’s life in relation to something higher, within oneself or above oneself; the freedom to search for conscience. And that is still protected by the government, however many mistakes and crimes America has been guilty of over the years. That’s one way of looking at the meaning of some of America’s ideals and values, a way that bases American democracy on deep spiritual and philosophical principles.

Needleman’s address is entitled “The One Great Question,” and you can find it, along with many other essays, articles, audio, and video, at his website, www.jacobneedleman.com. Needleman was concerned from early in his career with explaining and advancing the work of traditional—sometimes called primordial—philosophy, and his foreword to an anthology entitled The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Tradition, Symbolism is very much worth time and close reflection. After a life of intelligent work keeping the road of philosophy open to all, Jacob Needleman died in 2022 at the age of eighty-eight.

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