Shakespeare's Drama
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Shakespeare's Drama

Una Ellis-Fermor, Kenneth Muir, Kenneth Muir

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eBook - ePub

Shakespeare's Drama

Una Ellis-Fermor, Kenneth Muir, Kenneth Muir

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First published in 1980. This collection of essays by the first General Editor of the New Arden Shakespeare brings together the best of Ellis-Fermor's Shespearean criticism, in addition to outstanding essays on Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida. Collected and edited by Kenneth Muir, the book is prefaced by an appreciation of Ellis-Fermor's work.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136560484
Edition
1

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The equilibrium of tragedy

Finally, we may consider one more aspect of the function of limitation in drama.
There is, as we briefly suggested in the foregoing studies, a constant and creative conflict between content and form, technique and medium. But of no less significance is a conflict arising from limitation of mood. And the equilibrium which here results is essential to the highest reach of dramatic art. Indeed, in considering it we may perceive certain of the basic relations between limitation and achievement in drama. It is seen most clearly in tragedy, for tragedy depends most intimately upon the preservation of a strict and limiting balance between two contrary readings of life and their sequent emotions at work within the poet's mind. Such equilibrium is thus the distinguishing mark of the highest achievement in this kind, individual works tending to approach supremacy in so far as they derive from this conflict and reveal this resultant balance.
Other characteristics of fine tragedy must of course be present also if this is to be achieved in any play. There must be strength of emotion revealed through character and through significant related actions and underlying thought which further relates passion and event. Again, as in all great drama, directness, rapidity, and shapeliness of presentation must serve the ends simultaneously of concentration and of probability, and the resulting beauty of passion, form, and thought will constitute dramatic poetry, whether the vehicle be prose or verse. Finally, this image of tragic circumstance which we call a tragedy must involve catastrophe, either material or spiritual, arising naturally from the action and forming an integral part of it.
A rough description such as this allows us to reject, without further examination, certain types of play which bear a superficial or partial resemblance to great tragedy. Melodrama fails to integrate passion and event by thought, fails sometimes to relate the catastrophe to the action, and lacks in general that depth of imagination upon which the revelation of character and emotion depend; again, a mere chronicle of evil or of pathetic event, even though shapely, may fail to satisfy our sense of tragedy from lack of intensity in passion and in thought; and a play in which death or destruction comes by accident will fail again, however finely imagined, because the catastrophe is not integral to the play and to its underlying thought.1
But in great tragedy there is an element common to the individual plays, though differing in form and theme, an element which marks both the treatment of the material and the nature of the resulting interpretation: it is the presence of that conflict, to which we have just referred, between two impressions made by his experience upon the poet's mind.
The part of this experience which is most clearly revealed is the intense awareness of evil and pain. But in conflict with this specific response to fact and event is another of a wholly different kind; the intuitive and often undefined apprehension of another universe implying other values. Beyond the realization of evil and pain (and the work of art will be great in proportion as this is profound), beyond the apprehension of an alien destiny that appears to shape man's action, there is the perception, at once more comprehensive and less explicit, of a possible resolution, of some reconciliation with or interpretation in terms of good. The impressions in conflict may be of various kinds; of a malevolent and a beneficent world-order; of apparent lawlessness against underlying law, a casual against a causal, a chaotic against a patterned universe. And the unresolved conflict between them will at first give rise to a sense of mystery; to the assumption that evil can never be sounded, however thoroughly it be analysed, that its causes will never fully reveal themselves, even to the most passionate questioning.
It is here that, in the finest tragic writing, there is equilibrium. The reality of evil and pain is not denied; if it were, tragedy would not speak to man's condition as it has done from the time of Aeschylus to the present day. Nevertheless, something is revealed which makes possible the transvaluation of the values upon which this rests; the works of art which we call tragedies are distinguished from others, not only by technical characteristics of subject-matter or form, but also by the balance maintained between conflicting readings of the universe and of man's condition and destiny. The supreme works in this kind reveal that balance in the highest degree, thus-satisfying most nearly man's need to find his complex and contradictory experience transmuted into the enduring form of art. Certain tragedies, it is true, fail to maintain complete balance, some lessening their hold on the imagination by presenting irremediable evil and a satanic universe, and some, with similar consequences, indicating remedies so immediate or so easily defined that men's judgement and innate sanity mistrust them. Both kinds may nevertheless remain within the category of tragedy, provided they do not destroy either of the elements in whose conflict the average man recognizes an essential part of his own dual experience.
The characteristic balance thus obtained results, as we have said, in a play of a certain quality. In content and in thought tragedy is, like all great art, an interpretation of some part of the universe of man's experience, but inasmuch as it is dramatic it is primarily an interpretation by implication, by the emphasis it lays on certain parts of that experience, the significance with which it invests them, rather than by explicit or direct commentary. The part of this experience which it selects involves suffering and some kind of catastrophe, and these significant of something more than the bare facts actually present. Balance is thus maintained in all great tragedy; suffering and catastrophe upon the one hand and upon the other a relation (often unspecified and undefined) with some fundamental or universal law whose operation justifies or compensates them. From this arises the conflict of impressions; evident evil against partially hidden yet immanent and overruling good. Thus far all tragedy is akin.
In what writers is this most fully and most clearly revealed? In none perhaps more than in some of the major works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Ibsen. Here, though the evidence of pain and evil is never denied, the final position is not despair or rebellion, but a perception of that in man's destiny which resolves pain in exultation. (It may rise at times to a willing collaboration with the purposes of the unrevealed powers whose presence is felt though never fully understood.) Some such balance as this is to be found in the work of most of the world's greatest tragic writers and we may observe not only its nature but the various means by which that nature is maintained. In certain types of formally archaic tragedy the outer action or story my indicate the reading of life derived from the evidence of evil in fact and event, while that other universe and its differing values may, as in the Aeschylean chorus, be presented directly as comment. In another type, while the outer action may still present that first reading, the second may depend upon an inner action proceeding independently, though in close relation with the outer, and consisting of the experience of individual minds exploring the world of thought or of imagination. Shakespeare's major tragedies and such of his contemporaries' as achieve tragic balance seem generally to be of this kind. In a third kind again, where there is little or no comment and yet no clearly distinguished inner action, the implications of form alone maintain the balance. This appears to be the nature of the equilibrium in certain of the plays of Sophocles.
Some of the tragedies of Aeschylus present the two balancing perceptions — which by their balance make the tragic mood — in different and separate mediums.2 To the action or story, which is the main part of the play, falls the presentation of evil and that measure of implicit comment, through emphasis and selection, which is inseparable from creative art. It is left to the choruses to make the explicit comment on the action which subordinates it to the surrounding universe of order and law whose significance would else be obscure. The balance is superbly achieved and maintained, but by a division of functions, the one reading of life being presented by strictly dramatic, the other by non-dramatic methods. The theme of the Agamemnon and the Choephori is the implacable evil of the responsibility for sin, but throughout the plays as through most of Shakespeare's, there are seemingly contradictory references to forms of good apparently outside the evil; Zeus is all-wise, all powerful, the ‘Saviour’, he who pities.3 But, unlike Shakespeare or any but a few other dramatists, Aeschylus comments not only on the fact but on the relationship between the two balancing forces. Without reducing the significance of suffering or of evil, and while yet maintaining the equilibrium between it and the enveloping beneficence of Zeus, Aeschylus reveals the process by which the two are linked. Zeus does not merely pity, but leads man through pain to wisdom, so that the very suffering which arose from the presence of evil becomes the means of conversion and beatitude. Zeus himself became the all-comprehending by no other road.
In the two strict tragedies, the Agamemnon and the Choephori, there is little more than this indication of the relation between the two and the tragic balance is maintained. In the third play, when the Erinyes become the Eumenides, we pass from the drama of tragic equilibrium to the drama of beatitude, and the process is elucidated in Aeschylus's picture of the reconciliation of the two forces.
This method is not peculiar to the Greek drama of the fifth century B.C. Though it involves an interruption of the strict dramatic effect, it falls completely out of use only when naturalism has a fictitious value, as in the fourth-wall drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe. It will obviously be found in all imitations of or derivations from Greek drama at any period and in that breaking in of narrative method which appears to be natural to some drama, such as that of medieval Europe, in the early phases of its development. Modern variations may relate to either or both of these forerunners. Goethe, in the first part of Faust, assigned to his choric and prologue figures part at least of the function of redressing the tragic balance, and other kinds of extra-dramatic commentary are used for kindred purposes to the present day (as in Drink-water's Abraham Lincoln). Plays, again, which, with varying degrees of plausibility, temporarily invest certain of the characters from the main action with choric functions virtually use the same method. For so long as the choric commentary lasts (though it be only for a line or two) for so long the two balancing interpretations are presented in different and separate mediums. Many of the Elizabethans used this method, briefly and abstemiously, with fine effect: Webster had peculiar skill in this. And in much of the tragedy written in Europe during the last thirty years — to jump the intervening years with their many interesting uses, especially in Germany — the tendencies to expressionism on the one hand and to symbolism on the other have alike tempted playwrights to the same device, which they handle with confidence and fluency, but with somewhat less than Webster's effectiveness.
The balance between manifest evil and immanent good is maintained by a widely different process in the work of Shakespeare and most of his contemporaries. Except for a few extra-dramatic conventions irrelevant to the present issue, these plays are wholly dramatic in form, and such comment as there is is necessarily implicit. But here an outer and an inner action can be distinguished clearly; the outer, like the action of the Oresteia, presents by its story the reading of life which observes and admits the nature of evil and of suffering; again, as in Aeschylus's play, with that element of implicit comment which is inseparable from emphasis and selection. But behind this, coextensive with and yet frequently independent of it, is action on another plane of being which we may regard as an inner action, made up of the experiences of the minds, the thought-life of the characters. Though the distinction between the two does not become so marked in drama as to force itself upon the reader's observation until perhaps the middle of the nineteenth century,4 it is already visible in that of Shakespeare, and it is upon this inner action that the function devolves of maintaining tragic equilibrium by counterpoising the presentation of evil in the outer action. The thought-world of Cordelia or of Kent has relatively little effect upon the course of those events in Lear that are shaped by and shape the other characters; but it is of immense effect in our final impression of the universe revealed by the play, reaching its triumph in certain passages that, looking through death, create the harmony of the play.
To some degree already in Shakespeare, as in all major dramatists, a third means of balance is disclosed, and in a few, of a rare quality, it appears to be the only means and to work alone. Perhaps the earliest instances of this kind are to be found in some of the plays of Sophocles,5 where the interpretative function of the choric odes is less than in those of Aeschylus; here the balance is achieved within the strictly dramatic part of the play, yet without the help of any discernible separate inner action. The presence of a beneficent world-order, of immanent good, is implied in such plays as Oedipus or Macbeth by the presence of form6 as an integral part of the work of art even when evil or suffering is the theme. The impression left upon the mind is of an equilibrium between the manifestation of evil and the embodiment of the principle of order. Beauty of form and expression then represent by implication the forces of righteousness and beneficence of which Aeschylus speaks directly in the choric odes. In plays of this group, harmony of form is achieved despite the inherent evil or hideousness of the theme, and so profound is the transmutation that it becomes an image of ...

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