CHAPTER V. THE TRAGEDIES IT is generally allowed that the crowning achievements of Shakspeare's genius are the four Tragedies which he penned in the first five or six years of the seventeenth century, when he had reached the maturity of his powers, being about forty years of age— Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth-to which, however, must be added Romeo and Juliet, a splendid effort in the same species of drama written some years earlier. These five are not, indeed, his only tragedies; for several of his Histories would come under this designation; but they may conveniently be treated by themselves. First, we have to ask what Tragedy is. If a comedy is a play written to move laughter, a tragedy is one written to draw tears. People like to laugh, but they also like to weep-not real tears, indeed, which are very different things-but tears that can be easily wiped away. It is one of the mysteries of our nature that, while real grief is so abhorrent, counterfeit grief should afford pleasure. But the fact is undeniable. Children like to hear a story that makes them cry; the novel-reader considers no seal of the author's ability so certain as tears shed at the concluding chapter; and it is a compliment even to a sermon that it has made the hearers wipe their eyes. The success of a tragedy lies in this delicious commotion of feeling which it excites in the last act, where the most prominent personages usually come to a violent end, the carnage being sometimes very extensive indeed. "The tears of things" are the themes of tragedy. The hero is a person apparently destined by nature for happiness, but who somehow misses it and sinks under an accumulation of misfortunes, while others also are dragged down in his fall. The brighter his prospects have been and the more he has seemed to deserve a happy lot, the deeper is the pity stirred by his fate. What could exceed the pathos of the end of Othello? The hero is of a noble nature, as even his worst enemy confesses, and has served the state during a lifetime of danger and sacrifice, while Desdemona wins all hearts by her breeding, her frankness, her gaiety, her innocence, her wifely devotion; yet the happiness they might have enjoyed together is turned into mortal horror. The tears caused by the drama must not be too bitter; and so, while the fortunes of his heroes are sinking in the night of disaster and death, Shakspeare generally allows the faint dawn of a better day to become visible at the back of the clouds, to suggest that good will yet come out of present evil. This is most manifestly the case in Romeo and Juliet, where, it is evident at the close, the death of the youthful lovers will lead to the reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets and the banishment of civil broils from the state. But the most characteristic feature of the Shakspearean tragedy is that the catastrophe is always the outcome of some defect in the character of the hero. In Macbeth, which is in some respects the most tragic of all these productions, this is perfectly manifest; for it is ambition that ruins the hero, who is, at the outset, a brave and honoured soldier of his king and country. In Othello jealousy is the passion which plays havoc with the character of the hero and the fortunes of those around him. King Lear's overfondness is at the root of all his misfortunes. It has been denied that in Romeo and Juliet Shakspeare at all disapproves of the conduct of the hero and the heroine; but again and again, not only through the mouth of Friar Laurence but even through their own mouths, he indicates that their love has been too rash and precipitate to come to good. As Friar Laurence says, giving the moral of the whole, violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die; like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume: the sweetest honey |