Shakespeare and Tragedy

John Bayley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000350449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

Every generation develops its own approach to tragedy, attitudes successively influenced by such classic works as A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy and the studies in interpretation by G. Wilson Knight. A comprehensive new book on the subject by an author of the same calibre was long overdue.

In his book, originally published in 1981, John Bayley discusses the Roman plays, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens as well as the four major tragedies. He shows how Shakespeare's most successful tragic effects hinge on an opposition between the discourses of character and form, role and context. For example, in Lear the dramatis personae act in the dramatic world of tragedy which demands universality and high rhetoric of them. Yet they are human and have their being in the prosaic world of domesticity and plain speaking. The inevitable intrusion of the human world into the world of tragedy creates the play's powerful off-key effects. Similarly, the existential crisis in Macbeth can be understood in terms of the tension between accomplished action and the free-ranging domain of consciousness.

What is the relation between being and acting? How does an audience become intimate with a protagonist who is alienated from his own play? What did Shakespeare add to the form and traditions of tragedy? Do his masterpieces in the genre disturb and transform it in unexpected ways? These are the issues raised by this lucid and imaginative study. Professor Bayley's highly original rethinking of the problems will be a challenge to the Shakespearean scholar as well as an illumination to the general reader.

Chapter 1

The King’s Ship

On Dover cliff

In the fourth act of King Lear the blinded Gloucester comes to the edge of Dover cliff, led by his son Edgar in the disguise of a Tom of Bedlam. Or rather he does not quite come to the edge; how near it he gets is not clear.

GLOU. When shall I come to the top of that same hill?

EDG. You do climb up it now; look how we labour.

GLOU. Methinks the ground is even.

EDG. Horrible steep.

Hark! do you hear the sea?

GLOU. No, truly.

EDG. Why, then your other senses grow imperfect

By your eyes’ anguish.

IV. vi. 1–6

Keats was haunted by ‘Hark, do you hear the sea?’ It is a sea heard in the mind only, for Edgar will soon revise his deceit and say that he cannot hear it either. Their little exchange has a kind of intimacy deep inside it, as if the pair had grown accustomed to one another in the course of their long walk. But however far the pair may be from the cliff’s edge, Edgar’s next words bring us all to it.

Here’s the place, Stand still. How fearful

And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the mid-way air

Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half-way down

Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade.

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

The fishermen that walk upon the beach

Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring bark

Diminish’d to her cock, her cock a buoy

Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge

That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes

Cannot be heard so high.

IV. vi. 11–22

In the company of Garrick and some others Dr Johnson observed of this that ‘the crows impede your fall.’ If you expect to be in fear of falling Johnson is probably right. But in fact, as the speech takes you, you are doing something more like soaring. The workaday intimacy in that little exchange between the pair now bursts exuberantly out. In his mindless emphases (‘horrible. … fearful. … dreadful trade. …) Edgar apes a cheerful working-man’s relish in the way things are. In the midst of tragedy we briefly glimpse the daily round of hazard and accident – fires, floods, falling off ladders – and with Edgar we rise to the pointless occasion of them. However unexpected, there is here a proper moment for Dickensian enjoyment. And we have got there at last, to the cliff’s edge, for whatever purpose.

But there is no purpose, only the sudden sense of freedom and exhilaration. The crows and choughs, the mice-like fishermen, the samphire gatherer, are beheld by the spectators as if they had abruptly floated off into a world outside the play. Johnson’s logic makes us realise this. If the play had a mental world it must needs engross us in, and the characters along with us, then we should need to feel in that precipice the terror of what Gloucester thinks he is about to do. Then indeed, as Johnson says, we should need to feel the description to be ‘all precipice, all vacuum’. The crows then might certainly impede us from the play’s cliff of fall – ‘frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’. But we are outside the drama: the drama is nowhere; we have no need to pay attention to it but only to the goings-on at the foot of Dover cliff.

Those are not part of the play, but they do not disassociate themselves from it either. If they were either in it, or self-consciously out of it, the play would not be a Shakespearean tragedy, or rather not this tragedy by Shakespeare. All, but in various ways, disclose kinds of existence outside the preoccupations of their tragic matter. Sailors, fishermen and samphire gatherers, going about their occupation, are seen with the eye of joy, the joy of seeing the gift of ‘the clearest gods’. The events of tragedy are going on in what is according to its lights an equally workaday world, in which the audience are doing their bit. Here they look up and look out of it. In Shakespeare’s tragedies the transcendental takes many forms. But its effect is to make our consciousness feel homeless. There is in a way no tragedy other than the awareness of this. There are worlds which we can imagine and dream of in our philosophy but which we cannot live in – this is true even of the world we now see lived in by ships and waves, pebbles and people. The requirements of life make our sense imperfect through a necessary numbness; but the world Gloucester cannot see, and which only the play can show us, is also one which we recognise and delight in.

There is no question of any such worlds being ‘true’ ones, or truer than others. Shakespeare’s idealism is only accidentally Platonic: it does not suggest that reality is elsewhere and that we are living in a world of shadows. Shadows and reflections are what we live in and by; enriched and presented by art they become the life and soul of consciousness. In giving us the pulse of life Edgar’s description is none the less totally literature. Playing with shadows as it does – and ‘the best in this kind are but shadows’, as Theseus observes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – the play makes a vision of workaday life seen from the cliff’s height seem inhabited by different beings, a tragic glass without the bitter liquid in it. The trick of Shakespearean art makes the illusion at a distance different from that closer to hand. ‘Life’s a dream’, not in the sense in which Calderon’s play asserts the idea, but because the mirage of art itself gives the different appearances of life that constitute a dream. There is no waking, though the art of this tragedy suggests that we endure in order to awake.

Literary consciousness has come to reject tragedy as something that feigns by contriving the worst; and thus cheering us up, paradoxically, by an obvious misrepresentation of the way things really and unremittingly are. Shakespeare’s feigning is of a uniquely comprehensive kind which creates the appearance of tragic reality not by reduction but by multiplication. In his essay ‘Tragedy and the Whole Truth’, Aldous Huxley draws attention to the difference between the way in which tragic grief is represented and the ways in which it actually has to fit in to the priorities of existing. The overwhelming desire for a drink or something to eat never anticipates the proper expression of grief at the end of a tragedy. But Homer records in the Odyssey that after Scylla and Charybdis had seized and devoured some of their party, Ulysses and the survivors managed to land, and after recruiting themselves with the best supper they could make, began to lament and shed tears for their absent comrades. This account of Homer, says Huxley, is the whole truth as human beings have to experience it.

A valid point, for tragedians do not look at things but at the human version of them: they are concerned with what people create about themselves inside their minds, and what images and defensive overlookings they foster there. As a form, tragedy flourishes at times when language has the confidence of a specially rich and active function in relation to human fates – an elaborately protective function. The language of tragedy has words for any situation. Shakespeare represents grief, and the self-protector’s need to express it, in rhetorical modes of range and subtlety, from the noisy outburst of the nurse and the Capulet parents over the seemingly dead Juliet, to the response of the Scottish lords to Duncan’s murder, and the symphonic ritual of the survivors at the end of King Lear.

KENT. Is this the promis’d end?

EDG. Or image of that horror?

ALB. Fall and cease!

V. iii. 263–4

The language of tragedy does not describe events but takes them over, and in Shakespeare it does more. Words can redeem both protagonists and audience from those events by darting off outside them, under the impetus of their own self-generative ardour, ‘in the quick forge and working-house of thought’. A Greek chorus does this with more energy and obviousness, bringing a unity to the response of spectators and actors that does not exist in Shakespeare.

Coriolanus is too exhausted from the reaction after his bout of fighting in Corioli to remember the name of his former benefactor in the city whom he wished to be spared. He gives up the attempt and thinks only of a draught of wine. There is a small parallel there with Huxley’s point about Homer, the kind of resemblance that is sure to turn up somewhere in the tragedies. But the Dover cliff scene is itself, and amongst other things, an indicator of what Huxley was getting at. It releases us from the point of view, the preoccupation that, in rhetorical form, dominates tragedy. Romeo is dominated by it when he recalls the Mantuan apothecary who might sell him poison, but the poetry also shows us the apothecary as Edgar’s account showed us Dover cliff:

Let’s see for means: O mischief, thou art swift

To enter in the thoughts of desperate men.

I do remember an apothecary,

And hereabouts he dwells, which late I noted

In tattered weeds, with overwhelming brows,

Culling of simples; meagre were his looks,

Sharp misery had worn him to the bones:

And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,

An alligator stuff’d, and other skins

Of ill-shap’d fishes: and about his shelves

A beggarly account of empty boxes,

Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds,

Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses,

Were thinly scattered to make up a show.

V. i. 35–48

By contrast Macbeth’s rhetoric is wholly illustrative of himself:

Howe’er you come to know it, answer me.

Though you untie the winds and let them fight

Against the churches: though the yeasty waves

Confound and swallow navigation up;

Though bladed com be lodged and trees blown down;

Though castles topple on their warders’ heads;

Though palaces and pyramids do slope

Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure

Of nature’s germens tumble all together

Even till destruction sicken; answer me

To what I ask you.

IV. i. 51–61

That war of shadows is working for Macbeth, not carrying on a life of its own. And yet there seems a real froth of surf: a real cornfield flattened by wind and rain. Our glimpse of them is as brief as possible but it exists: the shadows are defined as sharply as possible. Performance is eked out with the mind in the fullest sense, and in the mind’s capacity for multiple response, each separated from the other.

The language of Shakespearean tragedy exactly comprehends and endorses the simplest religious premise: that we live in no abiding city but in a world of shadows out of which thought aspires to regions that seem to it everlasting. Religion needs a transcendental truth; Shakespeare’s transcendentalism is equally ideal but implies nothing but differentiation. It is brief, with a brevity that intensifies the relation between language and the mind, and often draws its own kind of attention to the process. Marvell, the most Shakespearean of poets, has the same sense of the possible relation in art of mind and language.

The mind that ocean, where each kind

Does streight its own resemblance find;

But it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds and other seas. …

We seem to feel the process going on all round us on the cliff-top. The sense of exhilarating space is in one area: the knowledge of Gloucester and his ruined sense, in another. The freedom of mind and sense, in this poetry, is often exulted in by the poetry itself; the power of its charge to leap from point to point with telegraphic economy is a feature that grows more marked in Shakespeare’s style as the plays go on.

I boarded the King’s ship; now on the beak

Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,

I flam’d amazement: sometimes I’d divide

And bum in many places; on the topmast,

The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,

Then meet and join.

I. ii. 196–201

Ariel’s description of his magic is also a description of the height of Shakespeare’s tragic style. Parodied and exuberant, it reveals itself in his words and actions: on Dover cliff it gives itself to us without consciousness, through the sole medium of what is created. It is a typical paradox that Shakespearean tragedy should consist so much of angelic moments – another is Banquo’s reference to ‘the temple- haunting martlet’ that makes its nest on the wall of Macbeth’s castle – which bring home the nature of the tragic, as his poetry gives it to us, more unmistakably than all its rhetoric of loss and darkness, misfortune and disaster.

The tragic relates here to the ideal, and how momentary it is; consciousness apprehends it as it declares itself, with the rapidity of magic. We think of Shakespeare as down-to-earth, and as a universal model sensibility, adjustable to any age. As regards his finest sense of the tragic neither of these assumptions is true. The distance, in Shakespearean tragedy, of ‘living’ from ‘writing’ is what gives him his complete anonymity, but it also reveals such writing to be an angelical activity. A coincidence with Renaissance idealism is conferred upon us, more or less, by our boarding the king’s ship, not to do as Ariel does, but to share in the rareness of his magic. Shakespearean tragedy depends upon the fact that angelic perceptions are too good for this life, but they are none the less what creatures who have to live this life, and live it with an unsuitably godlike apprehension, depend on.

We are accustomed today to think of the writer’s sensibility as what he lives in all the time and shares with us; must do so, totally, in order to be himself as a writer for us.

What I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole: whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist. … Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry – by which I mean saturated?

That is Virginia Woolf in A Writer’s Diary, talking about her novel The Waves, and how to read it. Her idea of the ‘saturation’ of consciousness is as different as possible from that elevation of consciousness which we have in Shakespeare. The logic of Virginia Woolf’s method is already present in Sterne, naturalised by Hegel and the German philosophers, explored by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Today it is taken for granted – ‘One life, one writing’ as the poet Robert Lowell puts it. Whitman would have understood that, and so would every American writer today. What is comprised is not so much the autobiographical, though that comes into it, as the homogeneity of consciousness manipulated by art – ‘the voice of the sea’ becomes a part of thought and sensation. In Shakespearean tragedy the voice of the sea, which Keats heard, comes from another world which our consciousness visits, aware that it cannot live there, or even remain there for more than a moment.

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land.

Romantic fish swam in nets, coming to the hand.

What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

Yeats put it succinctly. But to gasp upon the strand, the strand of our consciousness, is just what the modern writer wants to do. Keats himself is the remarkable case of instinctive understanding of the Shakespearean tragic principle. In one sense he is the most confiding of poets, but his notion of the heroic subject is a wholly Shakespearean one. Heat, cold, grief and joy, sensation itself, become for him in art tragic intuitions which can be visited only in a distant and formal medium corresponding to tragedy, the medium of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.

And they are gone. Aye, ages long ago

Those lovers fled away into the s...