How Shakespeare Revolutionized Tragedy, with Rhodri Lewis

BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

[Music plays]

When you hear the words Shakespeare and tragedy, you probably think right away of King Lear, Macbeth, or maybe Hamlet, and the fall from a great height. It’s such a common phrase that we all assume we know exactly what it means, but my guest today, Rhodri Lewis, has taken a fresh look in the ways in which Shakespeare experimented with classical tragedy, to put his own spin on tragic drama. A take that today still resonates as uniquely modern.

Rhodri Lewis teaches English at Princeton University, and his latest book tries to answer those questions. It’s called Shakespeare’s Tragic Art.

———–

BOGAEV: Hi, Rhodri. Welcome.

RHODRI LEWIS: Yes. Thanks for having me. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.

BOGAEV: I almost feel like apologizing for asking you to do this, but since we’re talking about how Shakespeare experimented with classic tragedy and the tragic form, we have to first make sure we know what the form is. So in 60 seconds or less, please define our term. What is tragedy? Go.

LEWIS: Well, actually it’s a really very low bar generically in the 16th century. It’s really at this stage a form of writing which is usually dramatic and concerns people of importance and foremost rank: princes, generals, kings, queens, those sorts of things. And tracks their sort of rise and fall in some way or another.

BOGAEV: In Shakespeare’s period, in the early modern period, you’re saying.

LEWIS: Exactly so, exactly so.

BOGAEV: Okay, I’m—first of all, kudos that you were able to do that and without using any Greek or Latin. I want to get into the text because it’s in the details that your argument really shines.

LEWIS: Sure.

BOGAEV: But first I do have, I was really interested in this one graph in your introduction which is about the challenge that Shakespeare took on with his tragedies. You write that—and this is a quote—”To find a way of writing about a world framed and characterized by delusions of one sort or another, and he took on this challenge without surrendering his works to expediency, opportunism, deceit, self-deceit, and despair.”

LEWIS: Sure.

BOGAEV: Okay, that’s a lot of emotions there. I mean, tell me more about what you mean here and why Shakespeare in particular faced this challenge.

LEWIS: What I suppose I was getting at there is the thing that I think he’s preoccupied with in these tragedies—or the principle thing he’s preoccupied with—is the series of fictions through which we try to explain ourselves and our worlds to ourselves, if that makes sense. The ideologies, the belief systems, the stories we tell ourselves in the attempt for things to cohere.

In a sense that kind of world is a world of satire. You know, where the satirist—the angry outsider is poking fun, savage fun very often, at the weaknesses and the corruptions and the blind spots and the barely constrained self-interest of various different actors. All of whom are, you know, hypocrites.

Shakespeare doesn’t do that. He tries to feel his way inside that world. To think his way inside that world. And to give us a space in his tragedies through which we, in the audience as readers or as playgoers or as both, are able to recognize something perhaps unsettling about the human condition. And that hopefully gives us the wherewithal to understand ourselves better. And perhaps to conduct ourselves in a more clear eyed and possibly humane sort of way.

BOGAEV: Oh, that’s interesting. And I wanted to ask that again, as a way of giving context for the conversation. Because it made me question, well, were other playwrights at the time not doing this?

LEWIS: You know, Shakespearean tragedy is a sort of distinctive way of writing. But I don’t want to sort of, by the same token, make Shakespeare sound like some sort of isolated, solitary genius.

I mean, he was able to lean on the examples and some of the ideas of the writers, the English writers, stage writers who went before him. And I suppose foremost amongst those are Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kidd.

Shakespeare learns from the sorts of things they’re doing and is quite happy to adapt them and to really take them over and to transform them into something of his own. I mean, he is a sort of, you know, magpie figure. But after he’s done his magpie work, he takes his shiny things and creates something very, very different, I think, and distinctive.

BOGAEV: Okay, great. Now I feel really grounded. Thank you for that. And now we can get our fingers into the plays. So what’s really interesting about your book is that you track Shakespeare’s experiments and tragedy in the order that he wrote them—or that we think he wrote them, because we have to say we don’t exactly know the order dates. But anyway, let’s go with it.

Titus Andronicus, you call a slasher movie, which I really appreciated. And that much of what we love in Shakespearean tragedy, we can see in Titus in embryonic form. So what new concept of tragedy is Shakespeare beginning to experiment with here? It’s a bloodbath, as you say.

LEWIS: It’s a bloodbath. Yeah.

What’s interesting about it and what I think makes it… justifies that claim about some parts of Shakespearean tragedy being there in embryo is the way in which the plot is organized. Not through things that are necessary.

I mean, conventional tragedy in one kind or another. The idea is the plot is held together by chains of either necessity or probability such that tragic inevitability. And those sorts of things that we perhaps talked about in high school or wrote essays about in high school can come into focus.

That’s not the case here. It’s a series of accidents and grand passions which don’t necessarily have to have happened the way they did, but do. Because for Shakespeare, I think it’s those sort of connected accidents, unintended consequences that actually animate the events in which we often get caught up and get beyond our control.

BOGAEV: As you say, Shakespeare is experimenting with plot, but he’s also working with language. And you point out that in Titus, people speak more Latin than people do in the other plays. But it makes his character seem wooden and cartoonish.

And you write that he fixes that problem, possibly, a few years later, we think, in Romeo and Juliet. How does he do that?

LEWIS: Well, you know, one of the things that tragic characters are supposed to do is to speak in, you know, highfalutin, philosophical language. And in Titus Andronicus, he tries to do that by, you know, quoting lots of Latin classics, Tragedy’s supposed to give rise to fear and pity. But we kind of only really feel fear. Well, I, anyway, only feel fear.

BOGAEV: And disgust.

LEWIS: And disgust. Rather than that sense of pity.

And he takes a few years off after this. Comes back with Romeo and Juliet. And I think it’s really in the character of Juliet—and it’s fascinating that it should be in a young woman is the vehicle for him, you know, first figuring this out. How to do that sort of thing that we think of as being a characteristic of Shakespearean tragedy.

Which is to say the soliloquy in which the character isn’t talking to us, like, say, Richard III breaking the fourth wall to tell us, you know, what his cunning stratagems are to entrap his rivals. But seeing that character talking to themselves.

And Juliet in particular in her family crypt just before she’s about to take the sleeping potion and she’s thinking, you know, “What if this goes wrong? What if I die? What if I’m stuck in here? How’s it all going to go?” Anyway, she runs through this—

BOGAEV: Right, “Oh, if I wake, shall I not be distraught?”

LEWIS: Precisely. And considering, you know, waking up and being surrounded by the bones of her dead family and Tybalt and, you know, whoever else. And this extraordinary sort of interiority, it—and he does it in a way that does not rely on highfalutin, humanistic, classically derived language.

And because she’s a woman, a young woman, I think it gives Shakespeare the freedom to experiment with a form of dramatic speech which is not weigh down, you know, classical derivations as Titus Andronicus does all the time. Juliet, precisely because she’s not an aristocrat and precisely because she’s a woman, gives him the space in which to start doing something very different.

BOGAEV: So if Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare experimenting with tragic inevitability and more naturalistic speech, what does his next tragedy or what we think is his next tragedy, Julius Caesar, tell us about the development of his tragic vision?

LEWIS: Yeah. I mean it’s one of the puzzles about that play is that it’s called Julius Caesar, right? I mean, it’s as if Macbeth were called “Duncan.”

BOGAEV: Right, because he goes away pretty quickly.

LEWIS: Yeah, the title character is portrayed as a sort of old soldier living on former glories. A little bit enfeebled. And so that the center of tragic focus is Brutus. That facility that Shakespeare has developed in himself of writing—and this is something that he’s gone on to do post Juliet—the way in which when we talk to ourselves, we very often deceive ourselves, is, I think, the real extraordinary achievement of Julius Caesar.

In the sense that when Brutus has been talking to Cassius. And Cassius has been trying to recruit him to the conspiracy, Brutus retires to his orchard to, you know, think it all over. But, you know, he desperately wants to do this. But he’s also a principled fellow who wants to think of himself as doing the right thing.

BOGAEV: Right, he’s trying to justify his deep sense of honor with this act of betrayal and assassination of Caesar. And he really, he just… I’m just picturing Patterson Joseph, because he was so wonderful in this role, arguing with himself, just hashing it out.

LEWIS: There’s a sense in which he’s talking himself into something that he’s decided to do already.

BOGAEV: Right.

LEWIS: If that makes sense.

BOGAEV: And that there you get to the delusion, the self-delusion.

LEWIS: That wonderful hinge in the play has fashioned it thus. He’s not actually been a threat. And no, you know, “Yes, I do have debts of loyalty. And yes, you know, he has been an impressive Roman leader for a very long time. But, you know, he may become a tyrant, so…” Not that we have any evidence that that’s actually true from the play, but he may, and that’s enough. “That’s enough, he must die.”

And it’s an extraordinary—it’s not hypocrisy. You know, it’s not—he doesn’t… he’s not acting in bad faith. He has talked himself into, you know… he’s done something. We’ve watched him justifying his desires to himself in a way that enables him to behave in the way in which he wants to.

And it’s a truly sort of extraordinary, dramatic, tragic moment where we get to see, you know, Brutus in a sense becoming self-alienated. Because he can’t acknowledge himself to himself. Because his, you know, the principled defender of the Republic is the image of himself that must hold on to.

And he can’t. He can’t allow himself to be… to acknowledge the part of himself. Which is that, you know, he wants to really do it just like Cassius does in order that his class can defend their power

BOGAEV: Right, and he shatters.

LEWIS: Yeah,

BOGAEV: Is this the beginning of the modern, unstable self? Is this why Julius Caesar seems—or Brutus seems so modern?

LEWIS: I mean, I’m always a bit wear of those sorts of claims, but there’s… I mean, in the sense that there’s plenty of people who go through cognate moments. In, for example, you know, Euripides—which is not very modern, not very recently, it was written a long time ago.

But there’s certainly… in my reading, I can’t think of anyone else who is doing this sort of thing with this degree of attention and acuity in, well, in any of the modern languages I read, anyway.

So I’m quite happy to say, certainly, whether this is the fractured modern self, I think that probably we can come back to that. If that exists, it has origins a little bit earlier, but this is certainly one of the first times we see the depiction kind of self on the stage or any space like that.

BOGAEV: Okay, well continuing what we think is chronologically. You turn to Hamlet next, and you point out that it’s a play about things. But that you analyze the opening scene in a way in which you say, “It forces the audience to grapple with the appearance of phenomena of things.” So elaborate on how this opening does that and how this is a continuation of Shakespeare’s transformation of the tragic form.

LEWIS: I talked a little bit just a second ago about the innovation or one of the innovations in Julius Caesar. Being that Shakespeare was able to talk about how this character, in talking to himself, ends up deceiving himself about who and what he is, which in turn leads to his destruction.

And one of the really interesting and perhaps the reason that Hamlet, you know, is probably still the tragedy—or at least the Shakespearean tragedy anyway—is that one of those things we can’t explain is us. You know, who and what we are, what we’re for what, what we should be feeling? People talk all the time about Hamlet’s dilemma. What it is. What is it that stops him revenging. And I think the answer is much, much simpler than people often, sort of, make out.

It’s that he doesn’t actually feel the burning desire for vengeance against his uncle that he expects to feel. When the ghost begins telling him, telling him his narration of how he was killed, and then Hamlet—immediately after that, we have his second soliloquy, where he talks about his memory and all the rest of it.

But, you know, it’s talking, saying a lot of the things that a revenger should say precisely because they enable him to, you know, avoid confronting the fact that he is not seized with the burning intensity, the vindictive ardor that the revenger is supposed to have. And that, you know, for example, Laertes has in spades when he finds out that Polonius has been killed later in the play.

He can’t… you know, he finds different ways of talking to himself to hide from the fact that he can’t, while simultaneously asserting that he can understand who he is and what he wants to do.

BOGAEV: I’m starting to understand something I was going to ask you, which is—and this is a rough paraphrase of your words—you write that, “This isn’t tragedy holding the mirror up to nature. But instead Shakespeare’s suggesting that the special status of tragedy is that it can reveal to its audiences their tendency to botch the words up to fit their own thoughts.”

LEWIS: Yeah. He loves versions of that phrase. I mean, we get them in Julius Caesar. We get them… well, we get them throughout all the tragedies, in fact, from Julius Caesar all the way through to Coriolanus.

That idea that we don’t just misapprehend the way things are, the way we are. But we misapprehend because of the way we talk to ourselves about the way things are.

And tragedy is a way of acknowledging that is the case. But those kinds of fiction needn’t actually have tragic or otherwise calamitous consequences if we acknowledge them as such. If that makes sense.

BOGAEV: Well, let me ask you about that, because my next question was how is Shakespeare experimenting with tragic catharsis in Hamlet?

LEWIS: Yeah, that’s a really good question and a very tricky one to answer. I mean, it’s tricky for a variety of reasons. I mean, I suppose foremost amongst which is, you know, historically speaking, catharsis—in this case, the 16th century, give or take—catharsis is not the big deal within tragic theory or practice that it would become in the 18th, 19th centuries and beyond.

But it’s usually thought of as being either a sort of purgation or a purification. You know, we have big feelings watching these plays. And having those big feelings, you know, leaves us purged in the same way that, you know, one might take a laxative to clear out the humors within an ancient medicine and make ourselves stop having bad dreams or whatever it might be. So that’s the, sort of, the principle idea of catharsis as a kind of emotional purgation.

BOGAEV: I love that, that tragedy is the ipecac of literature.

LEWIS: Indeed. I think Shakespeare is doing something else. I borrow here from the idea of catharsis sketched in the—by the Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Who says, “Actually, what we should really be thinking about is catharsis as a kind of clarification.”

And, you know, the ancient Greek actually bears that translation. It’s just not one that had been offered very much before. And it’s a particular kind of clarification.

We are very used to thinking of ourselves—human beings that is—as kind of rational agents whose intelligence and powers of reason enable them to understand themselves and the world around them. And more often than not, it’s a power that operates independently of our emotions

What Nussbaum argues, and I think really powerfully and persuasively in a book called The Fragility of Goodness, is that catharsis—as in this Aristotelian sense—is about recognizing that we are innately and inescapably emotional agents. That our emotions are a key part of our knowing process. You know, how we think and understand. So our rationality needs our emotions to process the world around it.

Tragedy on this telling is something which enables us to observe ourselves as, you know, emotional people. As emotional agents, at the same time as we are thinking. And it does so because tragedy, as it plays out before us on the stage, it teaches us through our emotions at the same time as our rationality.

We are forced because big feelings come up in our breasts, as it were, as we watch Hamlet. We are forced to confront the inherently emotional natures of our responses to the world.

I mean, Shakespeare obviously had not read Martha Nussbaum, and I’m not sure he’d have got on very well with her if he had. But that idea, I think, gets at, you know, the why. Why is he doing this? Why is he bothering writing these incredibly complicated explorations of the human condition when he could frankly be making more money with comedies and histories?

BOGAEV: Okay, really interesting. And now, so that’s what’s going on with Hamlet. And after Hamlet, you put yourself in Shakespeare’s position. And you ask this wonderful, down to earth—wonderfully down to earth question: how do you follow up a play like that? And I think the answer that you come up with is… well, you write the problem plays. So why? How do the problem plays set Shakespeare up to then write Othello and Macbeth?

LEWIS: Well, I mean, not just a problem play. I mean, we can look at Twelfth Night, you can look at the sonnets, you can look at The Pheonix and the Turtle—which is… it’s really bizarre, very, very difficult narrative poem. I think, you know, he, as I say—I mean, he tries to work out what he’s done. “What is this thing? Hamlet?”

BOGAEV: In Hamlet, you mean. “What did I do in Hamlet?”

LEWIS: I mean, “How does this… how can I,” you know? “What did I do? How can I replicate it? How can I move on from it?” Those sorts of things. I mean, the curious thing about Hamlet is that the play it adapts, which we sometimes call The Ur-Hamlet, which we think was on the stage about 1590.

And it was by all accounts, it was a real slasher of a revenge play which apparently was notorious. I mean, because we have several references to it in the record. And Shakespeare takes that on in his Hamlet and says, “Right, I’m going to take the worst, most schlocky, most sensationalistic revenge play you guys know. And I’m going to turn it into a deep, deep, deep meditation on the human condition.”

The problem he faces, I think, is how do you write the kind of tragedy in which I’m interested? How can I do that without the superstructure of a familiar plot that I can subvert. And he spends some time, I think, trying to answer that question.

And part of the reason we call the problem plays, “problem plays,”—and that’s in this case, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida—is that they don’t really fit into any of the other generic categories. They’re not comedies. They’re not tragedies.

And so he’s thinking about, you know, “How I can do characterization. How I can use speech. How I can do those sorts of things.” And the play I think most fully represents those challenges and those experiments and that determination to figure things out. And it’s the one I talk about, is Troilus and Cressida.

Which is, you know, a really kind of… it’s brilliant, intellectually demanding, intellectually stimulating play, but it’s very hard to stage. And it’s morality, if we can talk in those terms, is only just this side of nihilistic. And it’s one of the reasons it’s not performed very often, I think.

But it’s him, I think, trying to write his way into a certain kind of space that he can use and fast forward—and again, I feel slightly more confident in the chronology here saying fast forward to 1604. And the time when he’s writing Othello. Again, another story of love that goes tragically wrong.

He has cleared a little bit of the space that will enable him to sketch characters like Iago who, you know, ostensibly seem like ultra competent and very charismatic Machiavellian fixers. But who end up the victim of their own blind spots. And characters like Othello, who is so devoted to the idea of his own honorability that he’s able to be manipulated in different ways.

And again, these are not just conventional bad guys and dupes of the kind that you might find in a dark comedy. They’re characters in whom we have a sort of emotional, you know, pathetic in the sense of pathos feeling investment.

And I think that’s… it took him quite a lot of time and thought and determination to get to that kind of spot after writing Hamlet. Which we think he’s finished in probably about 1600; begins it in 1599, finishes it by the middle of 1600, give or take.

BOGAEV: Well, you’ve given me—you’ve given us all so much to think about with Othello. And I could ask you—I could spend the rest of our time on Othello, but we do have to leave time for Lear. I mean, come on. So how, or rather, I guess, where do you see Shakespeare taking his experimentation with the tragic form to the next level in this late tragedy?

LEWIS: Yeah. There’s a sort of, again, another having-cake-and-eating-it move I play several times in the book, is to borrow. Having said that, Aristotle’s not that important to Shakespeare, I borrow from Aristotle’s poetics. The sort of, the three essential parts of tragedy. One of which is plot, one of which is deep characterization, and the other of which is, sort of, highfalutin philosophical language we’ve talked about.

And what I think makes Lear distinctive is the degree to which he… well, he not only pushes each of those individually to their absolute limits or heights—I suppose, rather than limits. The tragic hole is an expression of the sort of deep interpenetration of those three different ways of doing things. Which is to say, the way in which characters speak to themselves and to one another is one of the engines of the plot, which then drives further speech and characterization in a sort of… it’s aesthetically speaking. It’s a virtuous circle. But you know, thematically in terms of the action that is being represented in the plot, it is anything but virtuous.

And it shows a whole range of characters, even, bad guys, so to speak. Charismatic bad guys like Edmund. It shows them all appealing to different versions of nature or of natural order as the ultimate arbiter. And the ultimate sort of guarantor of their own virtue, of their own their own capacity to do things for the right reasons.

And then it shows with really kind of, appalled sympathy, how none of them actually have access to an understanding of nature in general, or human nature in particular. And all of them are acting in some sense or other in ignorance, or deliberate, or inadvertent ignorance of, you know, who and what they are. How they could pursue happiness.

And it is as a result of that—I mean, I think it is. You know, in a way that Hamlet isn’t—at least in my experience of reading it and watching it performed—it is utterly gut wrenching because it takes away from us any form of the sort of consolations which we might usually grasp.

BOGAEV: It takes the ground out from under your feet, really.

LEWIS: Completely—and over again.

BOGAEV: Yeah. I think the sentence that really coalesced what you’re talking about for me was you write that, “In Lear, Shakespeare emphasizes that nature is understood by the human mind is a kind of artifice. It’s human artifice.” It’s, again, this fiction that we make up for ourselves that alienates us from ourselves and from nature.

LEWIS: Exactly so. And it’s, you know, in a sense, if we track back through the tragedies before Lear, you know, you can see people are appealing to ideological identity, Brutus’ national identity. In the case of, well, I suppose, Hamlet itself with Norwegians and Danes. Or in Troilus and Cressida with Trojans and Greeks. Gender and sexual identity in various different places. In Othello, obviously, racial identity is on the table. And all of which are exposed as fictions that because they deny their fictionality are dangerous and cancerous to the body politic, as it w ere. In Lear, I think he goes the whole hog. You know, “It is the world that we cannot get our heads around.”

BOGAEV: Well, in the end then, how does Shakespeare’s form of tragedy work on the audience, on us, differently than classical dramas?

LEWIS: Yeah, it’s a really nice question. I mean, it’s a hard one to answer because we don’t know how classical audiences. We can infer certain things, but, you know, it’s usually from sort of literary criticism with an agenda such as that of Aristotle.

What I think I can say for myself is that it’s the sort of the open ended-ness, if you like, of Shakespearean tragedy. I mean, classical tragedy whether by Aeschylus or Sophocles or Euripides in some modes or like Seneca, likes to tie all the loose ends together to give us some kind of resolution. Such that, you know, after we’ve experienced catharsis, we are able to have a sense that order is being restored.

BOGAEV: Which is the last thing you feel at the end of Lear. I mean, nothing is restored.

LEWIS: Utterly, utterly. Shakespeare loves advertising the fact that the conclusions to his tragedies, the degree of resolution, the degree of order we get is purely aesthetic or cosmetic or superficial. It’s purely on the order of the plot.

You know, we have Edgar and Albany walking off into the sunset saying that, “Well, you know, this has all been very sad, but people will be punished appropriately. We will get things back on the straight and narrow and all as well.” And, you know, it’s a bit like Polonius inheriting the earth.

You know, it’s just a glib, unpersuasive thing. Similar version in Hamlet and Macbeth, wherein in Hamlet, Fortinbras and his curiously proximate Norwegian army come along. Come in and take over and say some fine words about Hamlet. All you get at the end of Macbeth where Malcolm and Macduff return and, you know, all kinds of highfalutin rhetoric about redeeming the time and so on and so forth.

I think we’re supposed to feel those things as cosmetic, not because Shakespeare’s sort of given up. But because he wants to think about all kinds of conventional tragic closure as being if not a cheat, then a little bit too convenient.

Because tragedy, at least as I see him experimenting with it, is about grappling with that stuff that’s beyond our capacity fully to understand. And by tying a bow on it on the end, at the end, we are giving the audience too much of a pass.

So I think, you know, what he does with those kind of fake ordered endings—say at the end of Lear—is to prevent us saying the kinds of things that Edgar and Albany say to moralize away the awfulness. I mean, the true awfulness of the preceding 200 lines.

BOGAEV: Thank you so much. That was so clear and so interesting. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you and the book.

LEWIS: Barbara, thank you so very much. It’s been terrific talking to you.

———–

BOGAEV: Rhodri Lewis. His new book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, is out now from Princeton University Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical assistance from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited we’d love you even more if you could leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice to help others find the show.

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts.

The Folger’s campus on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, has been recently renovated and it’s open to the public more than ever before. Come check out our brand-new gardens and exhibition halls.

And if our discussion of Romeo and Juliet made you want to see the play, come check out Raymond O. Caldwell’s production at the Folger Theatre. Tickets and more information at our website, folger.edu.

Thanks so much for listening!