Discuss the Characteristics of a Shakespearean tragedy and

Discuss the Characteristics of a Shakespearean tragedy and illustrate Your answer from ‘Macbeth’.

Ans.

Its special characteristic

A Shakespearean tragedy is a complex picture reflecting the mystery of evil in conflict with the good in life. The conflict is many-sided. First it is a conflict between two groups of characters: one representing the good, and the other representing the evil. Secondly, it is a conflict narrowed down to principal characters–the hero and the villain. Thirdly, the conflict still further narrowed down and concentrated in one principal character – the hero or the villain-in whom there is an inner struggle between his own higher and lower nature, between conscience and desire, between reason and imagination, in short between the good and evil in himself. It is this inner conflict in the hero which is the special characteristic of a Shakespearean tragedy. The first two conflicts have a theatrical effect and form the body of the play; the third conflict has a dramatic effect and forms, as it were, the soul of the tragedy.

Its Hero is A Tragic Figure

Naturally, then our appreciation of a Shakespearean tragedy depends upon own appreciation of the character of its protagonist, its hero or its villain for in some of his tragedies he makes the hero a villain and the villain a hero. Let us limit our attention, first, to the hero of Shakespearean tragedy. The hero becomes a tragic figure because he has in his character some weakness, some error, some flaw which becomes fatal. From this source spring many evils and misfortunes which in their totality encompass the destruction of both the evil and a few other characters: the villain as well as the hero, the good and the bad, the innocent and guilty alike suffer and die as a result of the weakness or error of the hero. It is tragic. It would not be tragic if only the evil characters suffered and died. But the tragedy is so much good and nobility is “wasted”. A.C. Bradley has accordingly pointed out that the central impression of a Shakespearean tragedy is that of waste’. The forces let loose by the wrong choice or wrong judgement of the hero are so disproportionately greater than the one single initial error that they become irresistible and involve everyone in suffering and death. We see here the sublimity and grandeur of Shakespearean tragedy.

Its Emotional Effects

The nature of this tragedy is also distinguished by the emotions and the spectacle they produce on our minds. These are pity and terror, and they have been regarded as peculiarly tragic emotions right from the time of Aristotle, who first defined tragedy in terms of the emotional effect it produces. Shakespearean tragedy also produces these twin emotions of pity and terror terror at the vast scale of suffering and destruction released from one single error of the hero, and pity for perversion of much that was good, beautiful and promising in the hero. The final effect of terror and pity is Cathartic as we are purged of our feelings of fear and self-pity. We will, therefore, say that there is a tragic beauty in all great tragedies, including those of Shakespeare, on account of which we do not feel depressed, rebellious or cynical or bitter; we see that good finally triumphs over evil, though evil has done its worst.

The introduction of supernatural is another characteristic of a Shakespearean tragedy. We find fairies, evils, ghosts and witches who have supernatural knowledge and move the hero (and others) by their prophetic utterances. Their influence in not compulsive but the action of the character concerned is affected to an appreciable extent by the supernatural element.

This is why in all Shakespeare’s tragedies the final scene is on one of promise, hope and peace. The curtain falls down on such a scene promising a better and happier future. The tragedy ends with the vision of overcoming evil. And as for the tragic hero, we feel that his death is inevitable under the circumstances, and that his character in his fate. Our sense of justice is satisfied as this spectacle of the hero perishing, as it were, at his own hands. He reaps what he has sown, and though we cannot withhold our pity for him we cannot also grudge and grumble at his fate. Even the worst villains of Shakespeare stand self-condemned and self-confessed. As such, the final effect of a Shakespearean tragedy is not depressing but elevating. His tragedies strengthen our faith in human goodness and essential nobility of mans spirit.

Fatal Flaw of the Hero or Another Character

Shakespearean tragedy is the story of a great, good, promising person who has some fatal flew in his character which releases forces of evil which cause his own and other people’s death. This is Shakespeare’s tragic conception of life. It is common to all his tragedies. We may note how this is illustrated in some of his great tragedies before we proceed to illustrate it in ‘Macbeth’.

Hamlet, for example, is a prince endowed with the richest gifts of nature, culture and scholarship. He is an idealist living in a world of thought and reflection. His vision of life is good, beautiful and noble. But real life is full of evil and require our energetic, active, immediate opposition to it. It is precisely this faculty for action and prompt reaction to evil that Hamlet lacks.

Othello, too, is a valiant, noble, generous Moor, who rises to the highest military position in an alien culture and who excites the admiration of people who are culturally far advanced. But he is far too simple and gullible to survive in a society which is full of intriguing, hypocritical people. It is easy to deceive such a man and he is so deceived by the villain lago, who cleverly plants in his mind the seed of jealousy which grows and bears the bitterest of fruits. If Hamlet does not act quickly, Othello acts too quickly.

So it is with the other tragedies, Lear, every inch a king, an impressive figure, commits and error of judgement, an act of blunder when he banished his youngest daughter, Cordelia, who loves him sincerely and endows his kingdom upon his two other daughters who are selfish, cruel, treacherous and detestable! They banish him immediately and he suffers most painfully. And the tragedy is that not only does he go mad and dies but his sweetest daughter also dies most tragically.

So also it is with Caesar, who is too ambitious, with Antony who is too sensual, with Brutus who is too visionary and Coriolis, who is too proud. In each and all of these we witness the decline and fall of a grand, noble, good personage through an excess of same fault or passion which is a part of their nature.

Macbeth – A Truly Tragic Figure

It is now easy to see why Macbeth also is a truly tragic figure. Whatever the Macbeth of history or of some of Shakespeare’s critics may be Shakespeare presents his hero in the opening scene of the play. Macbeth is gifted with qualities of head and heart which excite our admiration and respect for him. He is presented as the power behind his monarch’s throne, the trusted nobleman and kinsman who is a strong bulwark against rebellion at home and invasion from abroad. He is conferred honour which his achievements deserve. He is gifted with a poet’s imagination so vivid so beautiful and so impressive that when he reflects and speaks solo, we are uplifted and wonder at this soldier’s poetry. This is what he is when we meet him for the first time in the play.

But what Macbeth does in the play is vastly different from what he is, and he does because he is inordinately, passionately and selfishly ambitious. He has his ‘royal ambition–to become the king of the country. This ambition drives him to commit the foulest of foul murders for he feels that even such a murder of King Duncan is preferable to the failure to achieve the crown. He feels all the ingratitude, monstrosity at the impardonableness of this murder but all the same he commits it. He is no doubt influenced by his wife, who shares his vaulting a ambition, and by the witches, who seem to know his future. But he is himself morally responsible for the crime because the thought of murdering Duncan was his. His wife and the witches encourage it. Provide opportunities for it and circumstances help its execution. He knows that he is excessively ambitious and he knows, too, that the means he adopts are evil, but he supposes that murder is lesser evil than the frustration involved in not getting the crown. And so he commits the crime and votes for evil and therefore becomes a tragic victim of Nemesis.

Macbeth’s tragedy thus arises out of his ambition which is so overpowering that it outruns his moral sense and asserts itself irresistibly. He becomes possessed by it; he plunges into crime with full knowledge of the Nemesis that will overtake him. In thus sacrificing his better nature on the altar of ambition, and in being an unwilling witness of that sacrifice. Macbeth becomes tragic in the Shakespearean sense. His character is his fate. If, for example, we place Hamlet in his situation, we see that no such tragedy is possible. Character determines fate.

Macbeth-A Hero who turns to be a villain

Macbeth is yet distinguished from the rest of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes in that he is a hero who turns out to be a villain. None of the other heroes becomes so. They surely kill people — innocent and guilty alike-but they do not commit a series of unprovoked murders such as Macbeth commits after his first murder. This first number had something heroic in it. The end was kingship though the means were mean. It aroused in him a moral repulsion to his conscience, his sense of justice and human grace as a true hero. These things gradually lessen and totally disappear in the series of crimes to which the first one gives rise.

This is the moral tragedy of Macbeth. It arouses pity because we know that a poetically sensitive nature’ has permitted itself to be thoroughly deadened and sensitive and purified. He is not unaware of it. He gives it pathetic expression which he cries out at the end.

I have almost forgot the taste of fears;

The time has been, my senses would have cool’d

To hear a night shriek: and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in’t. (Act V Scene V)

The words come from a man who has hesitated to kill and had been disgusted after killing. Now he no longer feels either hesitation or remorse. He is ‘supped full with horror’. He has become morally insensitive and natural. He has reached the depth of criminality and villainy. He was hero who felt once the terror and disgrace of murder; he is a villain now who is wholly insensitive to these fine feelings of man. That is how Shakespeare conceives a new type of tragic hero Macbeth the type of the hero who becomes a C villain by his own deeds – that is misdeed. There was a motive, a heroic motive for Duncan’s murder; there was none for that of Banquo, Macduff’s wife and children at all. The ‘motiveless malignity’ on the part of one whose sense of honour and grace was so acute at the start is the peculiar tragic trait in Macbeth. The plain moral is: don’t taste blood; it you do, you will be blood-minded in addition to being bloody-handed. To permit yourself with open eyes to tread the path of crime and reach hell which he knew to be the destination, is the tragedy of Macbeth. So ‘Macbeth’ like other tragedies of Shakespeare, is the tragedy of character.