Shakespearean Tragedy

Abstract

In Shakespeare’s tragedies, as in Dr Faustus , there is a concentration on the inner moral life of the protagonist, its growth or debasement, which is a feature of tragedy created inside a Christian world view. This did not matter so much to the Greeks, who felt that a man’s nature is completely expressed in what he does. While there is a great deal of crucial action in Shakespeare’s plays, this action does not tell the whole story about a man — ‘one may smile and smile, and be a villain’ as Hamlet discovers, and the intensity with which Shakespeare presents Macbeth’s seared conscience throughout the play makes it impossible to accept the phrase ‘this dead butcher’ as a wholly adequate epitaph on the man.

Cite this

George J. Watson (1983). Shakespearean Tragedy. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17121-7_4

@article{j1983shakespearean,
  title  = {Shakespearean Tragedy},
  author = {Watson, George J.},
  year   = {1983},
  doi    = {10.1007/978-1-349-17121-7_4}
}

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