Great Stage of Fools

A Guide to Six Shakespeare Plays

Peter J. Leithart

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781532638527, 9781532638534
• eBook ISBN: 9781532638541
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This book gives close attention to the poetry and plotting of six Shakespeare plays, three tragedies (Coriolanus, Richard III, and King Lear) and three comedies (Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice), paying particular attention to biblical imagery and theological themes of the plays.

1

Cannibal Mother

Coriolanus1

What is tragedy? You might think it’s an easy question to answer. Crack open the nearest copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, and there you have it.

It’s not so easy. Whom are you asking? What Chaucer meant by tragedy is not what Aristotle meant, and in the modern age Hegel and Nietzsche proposed entirely different theories of tragedy. To make things complicated, in his classic study of Shakespearean tragedy, A. C. Bradley reads Shakespeare through the lenses of Hegel, who lived centuries after Shakespeare.2

Let’s refine the question: What is Shakespearean tragedy? To get a clear angle, it’s helpful to review Aristotle’s theory, and to do that we have to reach back to Plato. Plato famously argues in the Republic (Book 10) that poetry, which includes drama as well as lyric and epic, “has a terrifying capacity for deforming even good people. Only a very few escape.” Apart from “hymns to the gods and eulogies of virtuous men,” he “flatly refused to admit any representational poetry” into his ideal city.

Plato has both metaphysical and moral objections to poetry. On the metaphysical side, Plato believes only the forms are fully real; sensible things—things you see, touch, hear, taste, and touch—are mere images of intelligible reality. Poets who write about this world create representations of things that aren’t really real to begin with. Because they’re two removes from Truth, artists can’t help but lie. On the ethical side, Plato says poets represent forms of behavior that ought not to be encouraged in a virtuous city and arouse passions of lust and anger that “should be left to wither” (Republic, Book X).3

Plato may have been one of the targets of Aristotle’s Poetics. We don’t know for sure. Whether he does it intentionally or not, Aristotle’s theory answers both sides of the Platonic suspicion of poetry. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle argues that all art is “mimetic,” an attempt to imitate something in the world. Plato believes the same, but the two philosophers mean something quite different by “imitation.” Plato thinks of artistic imitation as a mirror held up to reality that should directly reflect what is real. Since it cannot mirror reality, it lies. Aristotle knows artists can’t fully copy reality but insists that even a partial image can reveal something true.

Aristotle’s response to the ethical objection is evident in his definition of tragedy as “an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament . . . in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” The last clause highlights the moral effect of drama and provides Aristotle’s answer to Plato’s ethical objection (Poetics, 1.6).4

Aristotle’s theory has sometimes been interpreted as moralistic. Tragedy, it is said, tells of a generally decent fellow in a high position who falls because of some “tragic flaw” (hamartia). Usually, the tragic flaw is “hubris” or pride. Guilty of pride, the hero receives his just deserts in the end. The bloody finale brings “poetic justice” down on the head of the fallen hero. Watching this spectacle, the passions of the audience are “purged” (katharsis), uplifted and purified. Members of the audience go home better people for having watched the morality tale.

This interpretation of Aristotle is largely a product of French and English commentators from the early modern period. They misunderstand Aristotle very badly. It’s true that Aristotle believes the best tragic hero is a man in a high position, but he does not say that the hero falls because of an immoral act. In fact, he explicitly denies it: Anyone who acts immorally should suffer for it. There’s nothing tragic about justice. The main aim of tragedy is to have a cathartic effect on the audience, and poetic justice doesn’t produce any catharsis. The fall of a wicked man “would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear,” since “pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves” (Poetics, 2.13).

The moral interpretation of Aristotle depends on a Christian understanding of hamartia, the word used by New Testament writers for “sin.” In Aristotle, the word doesn’t mean “sin.” It refers instead to errors of judgment or mistakes that lead to catastrophe. Even when he uses the word in an ethical context, Aristotle intends something close to the original meaning: The “mean” of virtue is a target between two extremes, and the unvirtuous man fails because he “misses the mark” (hamartano).

When applying Aristotle’s theory, it’s vain to search for a moral flaw in Oedipus. Oedipus makes a series of (mostly innocent) blunders that lead to his downfall. These blunders are his hamartiai. For Aristotle, tragedy doesn’t illustrate the Pauline ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Shakespeare the Christian?
• Chapter 1: Cannibal Mother
• Chapter 2: Smiling Villain
• Chapter 3: Crawling Toward the Grave
• Chapter 4: The Course of True Love
• Chapter 5: Tempests Are Kind
• Chapter 6: Mercy Seasons Justice
• Bibliography