SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGIC ART

An expansive look at 10 plays.

Following up on his book on Hamlet, Lewis offers ambitious and intriguing discussions about Shakespeare’s tragedies. The Princeton professor wants to “understand as fully as I can what Shakespeare wrote, and why he wrote it and when he wrote it.” We must, he argues, attend closely to the tragedies as “works of dramatic art,” allowing us to engage with history, philosophy, theology, and politics and to understand how the Bard was influenced by his sources and centuries of humanism. Among his early tragedies, the “slasher movie” Titus Andronicus is “difficult to love,” but much that we love in the late plays, Lewis reminds us, is here in “embryonic form.” Romeo and Juliet is “not a work of tragic inevitability, but one that takes tragic inevitability as one of its subjects.” Lewis neatly shows how errors of judgment drive the plot in Julius Caesar. In Hamlet, “Shakespeare makes the case…for tragedy as the best and perhaps only medium through which one might discern what it is to be human.” In Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare slyly “wants us not only to see ourselves, but to see the ways in which we see ourselves,” something his tragic protagonists fail to do. Lewis believes Othello is Shakespeare’s “most intellectually demanding play.” In Macbeth, “tragedy comprises not only the mimetic presentation of being in time, but of our various attempts to go beyond it.” Succinctly put, King Lear translates “calamity into tragedy,” and Coriolanus is a “tragedy of selfhood and vexed identity.” Ultimately, Lewis sees the tragedies as a “series of experiments” whose brilliant aesthetic order reflects the disorder of human experience.

An erudite and scholarly exploration of the Bard’s work.