A Great New Book about Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Review: Shakespeare’s Tragic Art by Rhodri Lewis

By Ralph Goldswain

Lewis writes: ‘What do you do after writing something like Hamlet?’ And indeed, he suggests an answer to his own question: ‘You might spend some time trying to figure out what you had done in Hamlet.’

And that, applied to all Shakespeare’s tragedies, is what Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is: that is what Rhodri Lewis (senior research scholar and lecturer in Princeton University’s Department of English) did after writing about Hamlet in his previous book, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. After writing that book Lewis wanted to explore more, and in Shakespeare’s Tragic Art he explores the great questions: what Shakespeare made of the tragic dramas he had encountered; what interested him about them, how he transformed the genre, and why his tragic plays are consequential.

Lewis begins with a comprehensive historical survey of the perceptions of tragic drama by the scholars who have tried to define it over time. That mainly consists of those, like Aristotle, who attempted to provide a formula or template for tragic plays. However, Lewis argues, life doesn’t follow formulae: it is chaotic, formless, random, uncontrollable and unpredictable. Shakespeare’s approach to tragic drama was to try and represent how all that plays out in the lives of human beings.

For Shakespeare, plays were experiments. And each successive tragedy he wrote was a new step in his effort to do that – to experiment further. And so, in the course of that enquiry, his tragic playwriting was a journey in which he broke new ground with every play.

Lewis then goes on to demonstrate the randomness of existence by considering each of the tragedies, starting with the first, Titus Andronicus, all the way through to the last, Coriolanus, mapping the steps of that journey. The result is a clear and accessible account of something no-one has ever been able to comprehend – Shakespeare’s genius. It was a genius that allowed him to represent the experience of human beings living in an unpredictable world that defies analysis. In the world of Shakespeare’s tragedies, a more real world than exists in the tragedies of his predecessors, people struggle to find meaning in that meaningless universe but, of course, in vain, and it is the successful portrayal of that irrational universe and the monumental struggle to tame it, that makes Shakespeare’s tragedies so much more meaningful, realistic and superior to those of previous writers. The most valuable effect of the Shakespeare tragedies is their affirmation of the degree of knowledge of things unknowable that is available to us.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is an important addition to the literature about Shakespearean tragedy and essential reading for those interested in the subject. It is more than that, however – it offers an insight into a way of understanding those mysteries of human existence that Shakespeare had some understanding of and passed on to us through his tragic dramas.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art by Rhodri Lewis

Have you read this book yourself? We’d love to hear what you thought of it in the comments section below!