Living with the Tragedies: a Progressive Experience

Shakespeare’s tragedies are both the most accessible and the most formidable of his plays. One or two persons dominate each of them as their story provides the main action and the principal focus for our attention. In the comedies we cannot be so sure, as the action shifts from one set of persons to another and to a different part of the forest, another city, a more private room, or out into the street. The history plays are structured in much the same way as the comedies, but after Titus Andronicus the tragedies are more consistently focused on one story-line. Even when the scene moves from Scotland to England in Macbeth or from Egypt to Rome in Antony and Cleopatra, the thrust of the drama remains constant and keeps us watching and waiting for what will happen to the protagonists. The sub-plot of King Lear would seem an exception to this, but the story of the Duke of Gloucester and his sons reflects that of Lear and his daughters in many ways and soon becomes interwoven with it: Gloucester dies off stage without preventing the tragedy coming to a full close. And yet, while we do not lose our bearings in any of the major tragedies, the journey we follow makes new demands at each stage of the way, and what happens so fully engages us that we may well want to pause to take breath or avert our eyes as we begin to fear the outcome.