SOURCE: “Tragic Death and Dull Survival,” in The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare's Tragedies, pp. 1-28, University Press of Kentucky, 1978.

[In the excerpt below, Foreman identifies and discusses a set of features that he finds in the final scenes of Shakespeare's tragedies: the tragic figure's readiness for death, his or her spiritual or emotional isolation, the establishment of a new order in the world of the play, and the relative dullness of the characters who will administer this new order. Foreman also comments on three tragic endings that deviate from this pattern: Troilus and Cressida, Richard III, and Macbeth. Finally, he touches briefly on each of the tragedies whose concluding scenes are shaped by the motive of sexual love: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra.]

1

We that are young shall never see so much.

A dying man, early in one of Shakespeare's tragedies, tells us that “the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony”:

He that no more must say is listened more
Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose.
More are men's ends marked than their lives before.
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past.

(R2 II.i.5-6, 9-14)

It is to the harmony of the tragic close in Shakespeare that I wish to devote my attention…. I will attend to the words not only of the men who die but also of the men who survive them, and not only to the harmony of words in the final scenes, but also to the harmony of dramatic structure, to the often painful music of the shapes the characters seem to create for their lives, the shapes that Shakespeare has created for them, through them—his various music of the close.

Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra are, I think, Shakespeare's most complex and fascinating variations on the tragic ending, but in each of the tragedies he gives disaster a unique form, its own “deep harmony.” Because of this variety, it seems clear enough that Shakespeare experimented consciously with tragic form: when he repeats, he also changes, and changes more than superficially. As he extends and explores the possibilities of tragic form, he creates dramatic worlds which mirror the possibilities of our own; in bringing us to the boundaries of his art he brings us to the boundaries of human experience.

2

Death, at least, is common to the endings of Shakespeare's tragedies. However different the particular forms disaster takes in these plays, there is always death—death of the central figures, the tragic individuals, and often of others whose lives were closely bound up with the lives of the central figures.

“Death is a fearful thing,” says Claudio and elaborates in the famous lines which worked so powerfully on Samuel Johnson's imagination as to suggest unbearably the presence of death:¹

… to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling, ’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

(MM III.i.116, 118-32)

Though Measure for Measure is not a tragedy, it was written in a period when Shakespeare's imagination tended to express itself in tragic forms, and it shares with many of the tragedies a world in which individual desires apparently can never fit naturally, or without coercion, into society's rules. Yet this fearful image of death is not the obsession one finds in a tragic hero. The kind of suffering imagined by Claudio is more likely to characterize the tragic hero's life than his anticipation of death. It is true that Hamlet is concerned that one's sense of “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” interferes with one's impulse to act; but Hamlet also sees death as an end to life's torture, and one of the things Hamlet must do (and does) before assuming his tragic destiny is to exorcise his fears about experience after death. When the final scene comes, Hamlet is “ready” for death. “The readiness is all.” Almost all of Shakespeare's tragic figures are ready, in one way or another, and show none of the panic that is so painfully present in Claudio's speech.

In fact, most of the tragic characters eventually long for death, desire it, seek it, either as a rest from suffering or as the only thing consistent with their integrity, with their sense of the value of their own lives. There are the suicides—Romeo and Juliet, Brutus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and, in effect, Timon. There is Titus, who, living only for revenge, sets in motion a chain of events he can hardly hope to survive. There is Coriolanus, who accepts his death when he spares Rome. There is Troilus, who looks forward eagerly to death, though in the ironic world of his play he hasn't yet brought it off. There are Richard II, Hamlet, and Macbeth, who look toward death as relief from a disappointing world, though they all die like lions thrusting forth their paws. There is Richard III, who, though he experiences some panic after his prebattle dream, dies like the rest of these men and women, preferring to maintain his integrity by facing death instead of running away (he wants the horse in order that he may fight, not escape). Finally, there is Lear, essentially alone in this group as in his own play, in that he gives virtually no thought to his own death, one way or the other. He neither avoids it nor seeks it. Death catches Lear by surprise as it does no other tragic figure, so much so that he never even realizes that he is dying. He is the only one, in fact, who can be said to die of “natural causes,” a phrase that is hardly casual when we remember Lear's own search into “cause in nature,” down to the cause—the reason—for Cordelia's death. But like the rest, Lear is ready, or, in the terms of his play, “ripe.”

Claudio's speech on death expresses, rather, the feeling of those who stay alive to populate the world and keep society going. (Indeed, his impulse to populate the world is what gets him into a situation where he must contemplate death.) If Claudio had been killed, he would not have been tragic, only pitiful, like the equally panicky George in Richard III. In the tragedies, the character who perhaps comes closest to Claudio in sentiment (though he has a good deal more nerve) is that very untragic figure Edgar. “O, our lives' sweetness,” he says, “That we the pain of death would hourly die / Rather than die at once” (Lr V.iii.185-87), a remark which has little to do with the experience of Gloucester, which he is describing, but aptly characterizes Edgar's own kind of endurance in the face of adversity.

Edgar is an example of the kind of man who does not die at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy and who becomes instead the center of a new community, the reestablished order in which tragic figures have no place. An interest in the fate of the community is, like death, common to the ends of all the tragedies. In fact, Shakespeare places the fate of the central figure against the fate of the community in a way that characterizes the particular tragic world of each play. Shakespeare doesn't show us the same kind of world over and over again in his tragedies. Things can go wrong in many ways, and this relation of individual fate to communal fate suggests from play to play the particularities of his various tragic visions. Thus it is important to note the values embodied in the new, surviving order.

3

A Shakespearean play is in general a process of going from one order to another (the first sometimes shown, sometimes only implied), and this process itself always involves a good deal of disorder. That this is true is hardly surprising, since conflict is the basis of drama. But the nature of the disorder varies from play to play. If we ignore for the moment the complexities, ambivalences, and impurities that make Shakespearean drama so rich, we can divide the plays into groups according to whether the disorder is mainly creative or mainly destructive. The former is comic disorder; the latter is tragic.

The disorder of a given play is normally produced by characters who are felt to be the center of energy in the play, characters whose activity breaks down the conditions prevailing at the beginning. It is important to distinguish here between the disorder that we see in the course of the play (and this disorder is what I'm talking about here) and some “given” disorder that may be part of the play's premise. Thus it may be Duke Frederick and to a lesser degree Oliver who originally upset the order of things, but in the dramatic structure of As You Like It the centers of energy and of the dramatic disorder are Rosalind and, to a lesser degree, Orlando. The same distinction can be made in a tragedy: Claudius may be originally responsible for the rotten disorder in the state of Denmark, but what we see and hear in the course of the play is the energy of Hamlet breaking up the “order” that Claudius and others have tried to establish.

This center of disordering energy needn't lie primarily in a single character, particularly when love is involved. There are Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Lysander and Hermia and Demetrius and Helena, and so forth. And in Troilus and Cressida there is perhaps no center at all. In The Winter's Tale the center shifts and diversifies after the first half, which is dominated by Leontes. In Othello, Iago is the center at first but by the end of Act III he has managed to bring the tremendous energy of Othello into the disordering process, and Othello's energy supersedes his.²

I am interested here in what characterizes the kinds of energy that carry the tragedies to their final scenes, and for this purpose it is useful to distinguish broadly between comic disorder and tragic disorder. Comic disorder—the sort, for instance, of which Antipholus of Syracuse, Portia (of The Merchant of Venice), Rosalind, Viola, and Prospero are centers—is ultimately and especially creative disorder. It breaks down an original order that should not be maintained, an original order that is unproductive, unnatural, deadly, and stifling to the best tendencies of human nature and of the best characters in the play. And, most important, the creative energy that leads everyone into the disorder also leads the way out of it into a final order that embodies this energy and thus includes the best elements of the play's dramatic world. At the end of a play structured by comic energy we tend to have a sense of a productive community being established and a sense that what lies ahead for this community is health, growth, fertility, and a free harmony among its members—a harmony that has been achieved by the energy of the best in the community, not a harmony imposed on it by survivors of the dramatic process.³ Often (in A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest, for instance) we even have the feeling that the community is a harmonious part of a superhuman order.

Tragic disorder, on the other hand, is essentially destructive in its effect. The order that tragic energy breaks down may or may not be worth keeping. In Othello and Macbeth, for instance, it apparently is worth keeping, while in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet it is presumably not. Structurally, the value of the original order is not so important a question in tragedy as it is in comedy. But the order must be there, in one way or another, and the center of energy in the play breaks it down. As in comedy, the disorder finally issues in a new order, but in tragedy the new order does not embody the central energy, the tragic, destructive energy. The new community in tragedy excludes the best, either wiping it out or profiting by its self-destruction. (This exclusion is made easier by the fact that the central energy in tragedy is more likely than in comedy to be confined to one or two characters.) We often feel that the new order is imposed rather than achieved. We often have a sense of a community that is merely ordered, a community that is strong, stable, efficient, well administered, even bureaucratic. This new community, lacking the energy of the central figures, the tragic figures, seems to be thoroughly human. The final harmony is usually not part of a larger, superhuman harmony. If anything has been superhuman in the world, it has died out along with the tragic energy and those individual men and women who embodied it.

It is in the disorder that the tragedies test the limits of human experience, so that by analyzing the disorder we get a sense of the scope of the tragic energy and, as far as the endings are concerned, a sense of the human possibilities we have lost in losing the tragic hero. In the course of the plays, disorder may be stirred up on one or more of the following six levels, listed in order of increasing breadth: mental, sexual, familial, political or military, elemental or cosmic, and metaphysical. (This scheme is one way of describing the various levels of human experience on which disorder occurs; the division could be made in other ways.)⁴ These levels tend to be analogous or even congruent to each other. For example, sexual disorder in Antony and Cleopatra is seen as being also political. In Hamlet sexual disorder is also both mental and familial. Metaphorically, and by extension, it is also metaphysical.

Our sense of the “profundity” of any one of the tragedies depends on which and how many of these disorders are powerfully and extensively confronted. Hamlet and King Lear are generally accounted the greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies because, although they are very different in structure and tone, in both of them the situation blows up so thoroughly on so many levels. Macbeth is not far behind these two in its range, but we normally think of Othello—superbly powerful and painful as it is—as less profound because the elemental and metaphysical disorders, and even the political, are more narrowly circumscribed. There is no need here to go from play to play asking what disorders are stirred up in each case. Enough has been said to suggest how the range of disorder produced in the middle of a play shapes our sense of the human significance of the tragic death.

A Shakespearean tragedy, then, shows us the production of disorder on at least one of these planes, and in the final scenes—the area of the plays with which I am particularly concerned—this disorder, or complex of disorders, issues in a disaster (one or more deaths) and a new order. It is typical of Shakespeare to make the disaster or, especially, the new order in some way ironic. For one thing, the new order is likely to involve fewer levels, except in theory. We generally don't feel them in the order as we do in the disorder. There's no sexual disorder in Fortinbras's Denmark, but then there's no evident sexual order either. This failure to exist on several planes is one of the things that makes the new orders in the tragedies seem comparatively dull and bounded. The new world is not so rich as the one that has died out.

Shakespeare repeatedly sees the ironic nature of the new order as one of the things that makes the world tragic, a kind of posthumous cruelty, a final twisting of the knife, though we are the ones who are alive to feel it. While Romeo and Juliet are alive, Montague and Capulet, partly through traditional malice and partly through carelessness, allow a situation to continue which prevents the lovers from being together, except one time in secret; but once Romeo and Juliet lie together in death, the fathers are eager to let them lie together publicly forever, in monumental gold. Dead, they may be married, and world-famous. In Julius Caesar the new order, the venal rule of Antony and Octavius with its hints of the emergence of a new and more subtle Caesar, is precisely the sort of thing Brutus was trying to avoid by the act which allowed it to come into being. Brutus's republican virtue hastened the end of the republic. In Timon we see the triumph of a reasonable sort of order, neither perfectly good nor perfectly bad but on the whole as decent an arrangement as one might expect, an order that is just the sort of mixed state, reflecting a “mixed” human nature, that Timon could never accept, an order that is the antithesis of his either-or world, “Dead / Is noble Timon,” says Alcibiades:

Bring me into your city,
And I will use the olive with my sword,
Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
Prescribe to other, as each other's leech.

(V.iv.79-84)

Ironically, Alcibiades achieved this order, this mixed affair, partly in Timon's name.

Richard II is unique among these plays in that it is the begining of a historical series and explicitly looks forward to a continuation. Here we already see the new order in charge for two acts, and in subsequent plays we will see it work out its own destiny. Thus in Richard II it is finally the living Bolingbroke more than the dead Richard who is the victim of the irony at the end. We won't see the new order in action this way in any of the other tragedies, including Richard III, which ends the series. (The closest we come to an exception is the relation of Antony and Cleopatra to Julius Caesar; but though the complicating introduction of Cleopatra in the Roman plays may be compared to the introduction of Falstaff in the English, the concerns of Antony and Cleopatra are much different from those of Julius Caesar, and the earlier Roman play does not explicitly look beyond its own action the way Richard II does.)

Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra provide some of the most interesting examples of this ironic relationship between the new order and the disaster. …

4

Since the new order is so important to the structure of final scenes, being in a sense the background against which the tragic hero dies, we should look in a little more detail at the variety of things Shakespeare does with it as a formal device. The new orders, the worlds that go on without the energy of the tragic figures, vary in their natures, in the processes by which they come into being, and in their relationships to the designs or desires of the tragic figures.

Sometimes the process that leads to the establishment of the new order is directly opposed to the process generated by the energy of the tragic hero, in which case the drive to establish the new order produces the immediate occasion for the tragic death. This happens in Richard III, Richard II, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. In these cases, there is a character (or with Julius Caesar and Macbeth, two) who from at least the middle of the play on can be said to be the hero's antagonist(s). The defeat of the hero and the establishment of the new order are the direct result of the conflict between the heroes and the men who rule the new world.

In King Lear, Timon, and Titus Andronicus, the process that eventually establishes the new order ironically moves in the same general direction as the process generated by the tragic energy, even to the extent of being carried out at least partly in the hero's name. But Lear is past any comfort the victory of Albany and Edgar could give him, Timon has no interest in sharing the benefits of Alcibiades' conquest, and by the time Lucius takes over, Titus is dead.

In Hamlet the new order is causally incidental to the defeat and death of the tragic hero. Fortinbras's accidental assumption of power is, however, ironically parallel to the process initiated by the tragic hero (revenging a murdered father) and, for that reason, potentially antagonistic to the hero's desires. As it is, Hamlet, in the interests of a stable state, gives his dying support to Fortinbras's new order.

Sometimes the new order is really the old order, without the tragic figures, as in Romeo and Juliet and Othello; and in one case, Troilus and Cressida, the new order is really the old order, with the tragic figures, more or less. Troilus and Cressida is such an odd, ironic dramatic structure that I will save it for special treatment in the next section, observing here only that the old order and the firmly established new order are virtually the same—a chaos of wars and lechery, Greek and Trojan, the only change being that because of death in battle and venereal disease the number of participants seems to be dwindling. In Romeo and Juliet the prevailing order in Verona is antagonistic to the desires of the tragic figures, but to a large extent unconsciously so; because of the secrecy in which Romeo and Juliet carried on their love, the prevailing order never really knew what it was doing. Though the world does not change hands, there may be a new order at the end to the extent that the Montagues and the Capulets, such as are left, recognize their guilt and promise to change; but, as I noted in the previous section, the change is ironic, more depressing than hopeful, perhaps pointless. In Othello the new order is precisely the old order, with Lodovico representing the Duke of Venice. The prevailing order was neither antagonistic to the hero's desires nor aware of them. The irony here is that, so far as we can tell, the tragedy had no effect on the state other than to make it sad.

Because the new order is so often felt to be merely political, lacking any positive sense of order on other planes, perhaps the most common form for the process that leads to the new order is a movement to stabilize the state by consolidating or acquiring political power or by rescuing the state from irresponsible rulers or from chaos. There is, of course, no need for this kind of activity in either Romeo and Juliet or Othello, which is another way of saying that these are the most “domestic” of the tragedies. But in the other plays, the drive for a new political order puts forward a group of men who are, at least formally, winners of the play's conflicts, and they become the center of the final community from which the tragic figures are excluded. Because our sense of the value of that community in comparison with the value of the lost heroes depends partly on the motives of the men who are at its center, we shall look for a moment at the attitudes they have toward their enterprise.

We might begin by listing them, since we are temporarily giving the plays a new, unusual set of heroes: Lucius Andronicus, Richmond, Bolingbroke, Antony and Octavius (in Julius Caesar), Fortinbras, Albany and Edgar, Malcolm (with Macduff), Alcibiades, Octavius again (in Antony and Cleopatra), and Tullus Aufidius.

There are a number of motives operating in this group, and various combinations of motives. (After the early plays, with Lucius and Richmond, Shakespeare always sees his political winners in a complex, if not ironic, light.) Richmond and Malcolm clearly see themselves as rescuers of the state from a dangerous ruler and from moral and organic chaos. Bolingbroke also has this image of himself, maintaining the need for a responsible ruler to replace the self-indulgent Richard. But Bolingbroke's case is more complex because Richard II, unlike Richard III and Macbeth, came to the throne legitimately and also cannot be conveniently characterized as a devil. Thus Bolingbroke finds himself in the paradoxical position of having to break the law to protect the law. It is a paradox that haunts him to his death. Bolingbroke's case is also more complex than Richmond's or Malcolm's because Richard is alive for two acts after losing his power, as a kind of accusation of Bolingbroke's “responsible” act. Again this suggests the irony of Bolingbroke's “stabilization,” especially when coupled with the prophecies of future strife made by Richard and by Carlisle. Bolingbroke can't have peace with Richard alive or with Richard dead, an irony Shakespeare emphasizes in the final scene. (As I noted earlier, Shakespeare carefully places Richard II in a historical process which extends beyond the play's own dramatic structure.) Lucius Andronicus steps into a political vacuum to take charge after a chaotic final scene has wiped almost everbody else out (there are just enough people left to choose him as emperor). So does Fortinbras, who has the additional advantage of neither having to wipe anyone out himself nor having any emotional ties to those who are dead.

But another motive operates in these men, particularly when we associate Macduff with Malcolm—the motive of revenge. Though it operates more strongly in some than in others, there's at least a touch of the revenge motive in all the stabilizers. Lucius and Fortinbras are particularly interesting in that they are in effect successful, surviving revengers in plays where the central character was a revenger who could accomplish his end only at the cost of his life.

In the entire group of winners, Aufidius is the closest to being a villain. He is the least attractive, and his methods are the vilest. His use of a gang is reminiscent of Achilles. His motives are the least justifiable, though Shakespeare makes it clear that he is already well on the way to justifying them to the Volscian lords, who though they seem to be reasonable men, will apparently feel that they can use his military strength. (I suppose that is one sign of their common sense.)

Another motive that appears in this group and contributes to the shapes of the final scenes is simple acquisitiveness, or the will to power. All of them have it except Albany, who is only too eager to give his power and responsibility away. Acquisitiveness is underplayed in Lucius and Richmond, again a reflection of the relatively simple moral world of these early tragedies. Nor do Edgar and Malcolm-Macduff seem terribly eager for political power for its own sake, but the rest do. Bolingbroke and Fortinbras are great opportunists.⁵ So is Antony in Julius Caesar; but Octavius appears ready to overtake him, and in Antony and Cleopatra he does, becoming “the universal landlord.” Alcibiades leads an obvious war of conquest and revenge (not without moral justification, however); so does Coriolanus, with whom Plutarch compares Alcibiades, but Aufidius outdoes Coriolanus and thereby becomes the most powerful military man in the world.

Most of the winners like to see themselves as responsible men, who act as they do to bring moral as well as political order to the state. The “rescuers” clearly act responsibly, especially Bolingbroke, for it is his principal moral advantage over Richard. Octavius belongs here too, because he sees himself as the responsible leader of the Roman state in contrast to Antony, who lives a life of hedonistic self-indulgence in Alexandria.

It is interesting to consider Brutus and Cassius with this group, because one might say that they wished to be the winners in a Tragedy of Julius Caesar in which Caesar really was the tragic center. And their motives would be the ones we have been discussing. They would rescue the Roman state from the tyranny of Caesar and thus be responsible, in contrast to a self-willed Caesar and a hedonistic Antony. We can distinguish between them, too. Brutus has no revenge motive; Cassius has. Brutus is not acquisitive; Cassius has “an itching palm” (IV.iii.10) and can be “never at heart's ease / Whiles [he] behold[s] a greater than [himself]” (I.ii.208-9). Brutus has a sense of tradition; Cassius only plays on it. But Antony understands their motives, and the Roman mob's motives, well enough to defeat Brutus and Cassius, and they, not Caesar, become the centers of the tragedy. As a result their motives, especially Cassius's, begin to appear more complex, for tragic figures are more complex, in Shakespeare at least, than winners.⁶

5

Three plays may seem to be exceptions to what I have said about the tragedies' always ending with tragic death and a new order and to what I have said about the absence in the “new order” of a comprehensive positive sense of order. In Troilus and Cressida there seems to be no new order and perhaps no tragic death; and in Richard III and Macbeth the new orders are associated with a superhuman order and seem to represent more than simply political stability coupled with the absence of the more exotic disorders produced by the tragic heroes. (It is a curious additional distinction of these three plays that they are the only plays in which the tragic figures die in military combat.)⁷ If these plays are not absolute exceptions to what I said in the previous sections, they are at least cases where some qualification is needed.

Actually, there is a good deal of controversy over whether or not Troilus and Cressida should even be considered a tragedy. In terms of what I have been saying, there is certainly plenty of destructive disorder in Troilus and Cressida and little evidence of creative disorder. But the play has no clear center of energy, and the ending, instead of establishing a new community, implies the imminent destruction of any that might be left:

Sit, gods, upon your thrones, and smile at Troy.
I say, at once let your brief plagues be mercy,
And linger not our sure destructions on.

(V.x.7-9)

Troilus, who speaks these lines, is perhaps the character closest to being a center of energy or a tragic hero.⁸ But Troilus, like Timon, mechanically replaces one inadequate idealistic view of the world by another inadequate idealistic view which is worse than the first. His maturity is a matter of giving up lechery and addicting himself solely to wars. In these things he may be similar to other Shakespearean tragic heroes, but unlike them, he cannot find his consummation in death. Disaster only toys with Troilus. We do not see that final engagement with death that is so important in establishing the other tragic heroes in Shakespeare.

A character who does die in Troilus and Cressida, and probably the play's only other possibility for a tragic hero in the ordinary sense, is Hector. But Hector seems finally too absurd to be a hero. He gives up his noble, impressive, even courageous good sense for the sake of his honor (in the Trojan council of II.ii) and then shows us how petty a thing his honor really is by chasing a cowardly Greek simply to get his armor. He never realizes, even at the end, the contradictions in his behavior. When Achilles' gang strikes him down in V.viii, we feel more disgust at Achilles than sorrow for Hector. Shakespeare often makes his military heroes look silly near the end—it's one of his ways of facing the truth about human nature. But with Hector anything that might redeem him is way back in Act II. We may contrast Coriolanus: when his resolution collapses in V.iii, it collapses not to pursue, against his reason, a war he knows to be foolish, wasteful, and wrong, but to bring peace to Italy and to save the lives of those he loves. And where Hector (ironically) sees his collapse as leading to a life of honor, Coriolanus knows that his collapse entails his death. Coriolanus's decision redeems the immaturity of much of his behavior and makes his end terrible as Hector's is not.

Nevertheless, the energy displayed by Troilus, Hector, and the rest of the pack, Greek and Trojan, is tragic in that it is destructive (“Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion” [V.ii.190-91]), and it is this energy that gives the play its open-ended form, as if Shakespeare wondered what would happen in a world where tragic energy could not be consummated because no sense of community could oppose it, a world where there was no tension of this sort to create value. If there is “harmony” at the end of Troilus and Cressida, it lies in the universal acceptance of wars and lechery, a harmony based on eternal discord. Or, to use the method of my previous section, we may compare the final order with the nonexistent tragic deaths and conclude that in Troilus and Cressida the “new order” is so ironic as to be nonexistent. It mocks the “order” speech of Ulysses in I.iii and the “reason” of Hector in II.ii. Not that this matters much, since both Ulysses and Hector show by their subsequent words and actions that they don't have any great emotional stake in the substance of their arguments. But the final order manages to mock even what the characters do believe in—Hector's honor, Achilles' valor, Ulysses' policy, Troilus's romantic love, Cressida's faith, Menelaus-and-Paris's woman, Pandarus's sexual playpen, everybody's war—everything except Thersites' universal disgust, which isn't worth believing in.

I see Troilus and Cressida, then, as an exploration of tragic form, a flirting with its limits: a “tragic” story unfolds in a world where nothing can confer tragic values on the story's heroes. The play is a tragic structure which its characters, as Lepidus the role of triumvir, cannot fill: “To be called into a huge sphere and not to be seen to move in't, are the holes where eyes should be, which pitifully disaster the cheeks” (AC II.vii.14-16). So we see, short of absolute burlesque, the reductio ad absurdum of tragic roles—the military tragic hero, the political tragic hero, the romantic tragic hero, the philosophical tragic hero—all these are deflated in Troilus and Cressida, and we are left at the end with Troilus invoking destruction, and Pandarus, in his “tragic” fall from power, holding up the mirror to an unheroic sort of magistrate:

O world, world! thus is the poor agent despised. O traders and bawds, how earnestly are you set a-work, and how ill requited! Why should our endeavor be so loved, and the performance so loathed? What verse for it? What instance for it? Let me see.

Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing,
Till he hath lost his honey and his sting;
And being once subdued in armed tail,
Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail.
Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths:
“As many as be here of Pandar's hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar's fall;
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made.
It should be now, but that my fear is this,
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.
Till then I'll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases.”

(V.x.35-55)

In a world where destruction is permanent, a slaughter-minded idealist and a syphilitic pimp are fitting heroes.

Richard III and Macbeth, the other obvious exceptions to some of the things I was saying about the new order at the end of a tragedy, are quite different from Troilus and Cressida in their sense of the new community. The “new order” in Troilus and Cressida is simply an intensification and purification of the old disorder. In Richard III and Macbeth the new order takes on some of the aura of health, fertility, and superhuman harmony that surrounds the new order at the end of the comedies.

In writing Macbeth a dozen or so years after Richard III, Shakespeare comes as close as he ever does to repeating a tragic structure. In both, the tragic hero is a villain. Both Richard and Macbeth are military heroes who have been the main support of their kings in a civil war. (For Richard, see 3 Henry VI, especially I.i and IV.v.) Both betray their kings, turn regicide, and usurp the crown. The deeds of both are increasingly bloody, and both are increasingly isolated in their tyranny while there is a massing of forces opposed to them. Both are troubled by ghosts, and both die bravely in single combat against an opponent whom prophesy had designated as their bane. The successful new rulers bring order to the kingdoms, order associated with a return to health, fertility, and renewed generation. Both new political orders, Richmond's and Malcolm's, are also seen as part of a larger historical pattern and a divine order. It is the nature of the new orders in Richard III and Macbeth—the sense of promised generation and divine sanction—that makes these two plays exceptions to some of the statements I made above about Act V orders in the tragedies.⁹

There are of course important differences between the two plays, differences which reflect the maturing of Shakespeare's art in the dozen or so years separating their composition. There are differences in methods of characterization and consequently in the implications of the tragic deaths. Richard in soliloquy speaks to us; Macbeth speaks to himself. Richard's problems are mostly practical until the final scenes, but Macbeth feels his guilt early, and we move with him from fearful apprehension of guilt into metaphysical considerations that Richard never dreams of. When Richard realizes that “there is no creature loves me; / And if I die, no soul will pity me” (V.iii.201-2), I pity him though he says I won't. But I don't feel the existential terror I feel for Macbeth, whose death comes at the end of a long inward agony and has such cosmic reverberations. Macbeth can (and does) say what Richard says; no one loves him now, either. But he can say more:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(V.v. 24-28)

Another important difference between the plays, a difference clearly related to the differences in characterization and meta-physical scope, is the far greater poetic richness of Macbeth, the greater mythic suggestiveness of its imagery; and this poetic richness has an important effect in shaping our sense of what is involved in the final scenes. The generative powers of England are restored by the return of Richmond in the last act of Richard III. But the problem of generation, or fertility, or organic growth, though certainly present and important in Richard III, is not as integral and extensive a part of the poetic texture as it is in Macbeth. Richard kills children too, but neither the play's language nor the various characters' preoccupations suggest in so intense a way as in Macbeth that the villain hero is a threat to the possibility of life as well as to individual lives. Richmond brings less than Malcolm.

Richmond is less than Malcolm, and this is the last difference between the two plays I wish to explore, a difference that is important in determining the different effects of the two endings, the different relations of the new order to the destructive tragic energy of the protagonists.

Only in Macbeth does the order established at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy give us any substantial compensation for the greatness we have lost. Richard III and Macbeth have, as we have seen, formally the same sort of ending: the good guys defeat the villain, to put it bluntly. But Richmond's strength is merely a matter of theory and of plot—of form, not of real substance. He wins, he says the right things, and so forth, but he lacks real vitality, or what I would call a concrete integrity. The group that defeats Macbeth—for Malcolm has allies who are not dramatically anonymous as Richmond's pretty much are—is different. Malcolm and Macduff (and Banquo, who is on that side and whose role they carry on) do have this concrete integrity, integrity one gets from a more vital contact with evil than we sense in Richmond. Macduff feels guilt for the death of his family. Malcolm imagines himself worse than Macbeth (thus managing to be both innocent and guilty). Banquo meets the witches and bids them speak to him; he understands Macbeth; and he has guilty dreams that show evil working in him as in Macbeth: “Merciful powers, / Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose” (II.i.7-9). But as the sequel makes clear, he resists the evil that works in his unconscious, resists the temptation that Macbeth cannot. A simple enmity to evil, a refusal to have anything really to do with it except destroy it, is not enough—one must recognize one's own capacity for evil. Thus Richard's enemies are bland and Macbeth's are not. In Macbeth but not in Richard III the promise of generation is combined with a concrete integrity on the part of those who will fulfill the promise. Not only had Shakespeare's technique matured since the early 1590s, but also his sense of the world's moral structure had grown more complex. In fact, these two developments are complementary.

The new order in Richard III or Macbeth is richer in mythic implications than the new order in any of the other tragedies. Nevertheless the center of energy is still Richard or Macbeth. After all is said about the more magical promise of generation at the end of these plays and about the concrete integrity of the new leaders and the poetic richness of the generation theme in Macbeth, the new order in each case is still duller, more mundane, and dramatically less vital than the destructive energy of the tragic figures who die.

6

One of the structural devices by which Shakespeare forces us to see the death of the tragic hero in the context of the new, nontragic order is the isolation of the central figure, a stripping from him of power, wealth, friends, family, allies, people who understand him, a common understanding of the world, human contact generally, sanity, and finally life.¹⁰ In his isolation we see more clearly what the tragic hero embodies, and we see what is left over when he dies.

It is not hard to find examples of tragic isolation: Titus in his unhinged hate; Richard III without even a horse; Richard II reduced to peopling his prison with thoughts; Brutus reduced to his sleepy sword-holder; Hamlet in his readiness; Hector among Achilles' thugs, Troilus in a world where no one can appreciate a sense of value, and Pandarus in a world where no one needs his services; Othello, having given up belief in his wife for belief in his friend, finding that in the end he has neither; Lear, alone in his ability to suffer, barely aware of an outside world, and then in an apparently trivial way (“Pray you undo this button”); Macbeth, once beloved and admired of all, now isolated even from his wife by madness and death, ending hated and despised by all; Timon actively seeking isolation from all that is human and all that is alive; Coriolanus, first going into exile like “a lonely dragon” to his fen, then going again to an alien land, to what he knows will be his death. Though some of the characters don's seem so very isolated physically (Titus, Hamlet, and Lear, for instance), all are terribly isolated in their imaginations and their apprehension of the world. Even Brutus must be, though, stoic that he is, he doesn't like to show it. It isn't necessary to go into more detail about this common structure. The similarities are clear enough. (So are the many differences. Even Richard III and Macbeth are different: Macbeth sees hardly any point in winning the last battle.) It is in those plays which during the nineteenth century came to be considered the “great” tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth—that the mental isolation of the hero is most intense. Even if we no longer accept this traditional classification, it remains a good indication of the importance, in Shakespeare's tragic method, of the isolation of the central figure.

7

A special case, and a particularly interesting one given our concern … with the separation between the tragic figures and a surviving community, is the isolation of tragic characters in pairs; for an isolation of a pair of characters from the rest of society offers the possibility of an alternative kind of union to that of the surviving community, a kind of union embodying different, probably more exciting, values than those found among the survivors. The isolation of characters in pairs usually occurs in the plays where sexual love is an important shaping motive—Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In each of these plays, different as they are, the form of the final scenes depends in a significant way on the nature of the love relationship we have seen.

Sexual love, as a force that brings people together, provides the energy that moves Shakespearean comedy toward an end in marriage and in a community based on marriage, a community that, as we noted above, includes the best human possibilities found in the world of the drama and, at least implicitly, promises to reproduce them. But in tragedy the movement is not toward marriage but toward death, so that the best the characters can hope for is a metaphoric consummation, a Liebestod, in which the marriage bed is a tomb. Often they don't even get that, but instead find separate deaths after love has failed, perhaps after marriage has failed. Sometimes the enemy to love is society, sometimes the dangerous forms of passion that arise within the love itself. In any case, the outside community will survive and the “community” of love will not.

The community that survives after the lovers' deaths is held together by a duller bond than love. In not one of the tragedies does Shakespeare suggest that sexual love is a possibility in the surviving community. (He doesn't literally say that it is not a possibility, but the closest he comes to actually implying such a relationship is in Richmond's proposed marriage to Elizabeth. But, aside from the fact that we never see Elizabeth—indeed, has Richmond ever seen her?—any “love” in that pair is dynastic and emblematic, not romantic and sexual.) In fact, in all the tragedies only one named woman (I ignore crowds, as in Coriolanus) is both onstage and alive at the end of the play—Lady Capulet, who, though her age may be computed at under thirty, gives the impression (V.iii.207) of being old and ready to think of dying, unmetaphorically, as her Montague counterpart already has. The presence and absence of death aside, there is no difference between the tragedies and the comedies more striking than this—the comedies must have women present and alive at the end, the tragedies virtually can not. The absence of sexual love (in fact, the absence, really, of any kind of love whatsoever) is one of the most disturbing characteristics of these surviving communities. It is, as I say, one of the things that make these worlds tragic. The comedies will isolate the absence or the failure of love in a Shylock, a Jaques, a Malvolio, in order to celebrate love in the continuing community. But the continuing community in the tragedies loses the often disruptive energy of love without gaining any kind of bond beyond the civic or political, and thus fails to embody either tragic or comic values.

Within the group of plays in which the tragic characters are isolated in pairs, we may distinguish those plays where the pair is finally isolated in union from those plays where the pair is both isolated from society and divided within itself. In Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra the sexual partners are felt to be united at the end—in death. The final scenes in both plays are achievements of that union, and in both there are two tragic figures. In Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and Macbeth the isolation of the pair of lovers involves separation, not union in death. In each case the male partner is the center of tragic interest. Troilus is more important than Cressida (I suppose because he is actively involved in the wars as well as in the lechery), even though the title gives her equal billing. Desdemona and Lady Macbeth obviously make less intense claims on our attention than their husbands. Nevertheless the love relationships in these plays are structurally crucial in ways that, say, the Brutus-Portia relationship, or even the Hamlet-Ophelia relationship, is not.

The plays that end in separation focus on the way love goes wrong in itself, not just in relation to an outside world. Therefore, in examining the effect of love as a shaping motive in the final scenes, we must clearly diversify our sense of love to include some of its varieties and perversions: sexual love, romantic love, idealistic love, lust, jealousy, need to be loved, possession, domination by means of love, and politic love. Most of these are likely to show up somehow in any given relationship, even in those plays which end in union, though I am mainly concerned here with kinds of love that have major structural influence on the plays. Moreover, these varieties are rarely separate from one another. Thus the love of Romeo and Juliet is probably the “purest” among these plays, by which I mean that there is comparatively little in it of jealousy, domination, or the more unredeemed forms of lust. Certainly it is not very politic (though see II.iii.91-92). Nevertheless, despite the fact that its interruptions are largely external, we can see in it disturbing (and as it turns out, fatal) traces of overromanticizing (principally in Romeo), idealism, and a hasty sexual desire which by some moralists might be called lust. But in general, their love is simply too uncompromising for the world they live in, and it drives them in the final scene to the only world where it seems they can be united, the world of death. They lack that balance of absolute love and common sense, of sexual desire and wise restraint, that we see, for example, in a Rosalind. But then happy, successful love is a comic mode.

In Othello a too unbalanced love turns into jealousy and a too unbalanced hate. Yet the love is never entirely lost, and the pressure of two absolutes tears Othello apart. Moreover, the transformation of love into hate also turns it into perverted lust, as Othello is driven by Iago to see Desdemona as “a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in” (IV.ii.61-62). The Othello who enters Desdemona's bedroom with murder on his mind has very mixed and compromised motives.

At the beginning of this final scene Othello's isolation is complete; he is isolated from the whole world by his monstrous notion of the truth. Desdemona too has become isolated, even from Emilia, since her husband's love has changed so mysteriously. Her own love does not fail, however, even after Othello has strangled her and she is dying. When Othello, having realized his error, kills himself, he creates a brief symbolic union:

I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this,
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.

(V.ii.359-60)

This kiss creates here that ancient metaphorical association of sexual consummation and death that Shakespeare uses so extensively to celebrate the “eternal” unions of Romeo and Juliet and of Antony and Cleopatra. But the love union here, which follows such violent separation, separation much more violent than that in Troilus and Cressida or Macbeth, is as ironic as it is moving; for Othello kills both of them, they do not die mutually, and Othello places himself in hell as securely as he sees Desdemona in heaven. The kiss is ultimately an image not of sexual consummation but of sexual frustration.

Macbeth is really on the perimeter of this group, since love itself is not an important theme in the final scenes. But the structure of these scenes is very much the product of the love relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as Shakespeare has developed it in the early acts, where we see a perversion of sexual roles and the use of love as a means of domination.

In I.vii the sexual bond between herself and Macbeth is the means Lady Macbeth uses to force him against his better judgment into the murder of Duncan. To do this, however, she must destroy their sexual roles. She has already ritually unsexed herself (I.v.38-48), and here in I.vii she is herself identified with maleness (54-59, 72-74) and makes Macbeth's reluctance a sign of his unmanliness and a measure of the quality of his love (35-41, 47-54). When Macbeth declares that he “dare[s] do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none” (46-47), he is right, and his subsequent action is, despite Lady Macbeth's statements, an abandonment of his manhood. This confused love relationship between Macbeth and his lady becomes part of the play's pervasive fertility theme. Metaphorically speaking, because of what is essentially a kind of sexual perversion, Macbeth's marriage is not fertile, nor is Scotland under his reign fertile. (In both ways he is unlike the king he kills.) Macbeth's turning for support from Lady Macbeth to the weird sisters is part of the same metaphoric structure, since they do look like women who are men (I.iii.45-47), and the result of their persuasion is the cowing of his better part of man. Macbeth's great crimes after his murder of Duncan are either murders of those who, like Duncan, are fruitful (Banquo, who is manly in the way Macbeth has abdicated [II.iii.122-28], and Lady Macduff, who is so poignantly womanly and motherly in contrast to Lady Macbeth) or murders of all their children he can get his hands on. (The implied fruitfulness of Fleance, who escapes, is the ultimate horror in Macbeth's witch-induced vision in IV.i.) Macbeth's failure of manhood is further shown by the fact that the active and valiant warrior described in Act I performs none of these crimes with his own hands.

After the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth is progressively isolated from the partner of her crime, first by his failure to consult her before acting, then by her madness, finally by her death. One feels that their love relationship, like the relationship of Macbeth to Duncan, was once proper (and to that extent potentially fruitful—see I.iv.28-33), but that, again like Macbeth's loyalty to Duncan, their marriage was destroyed by ambition. There's not the least hint of union in the final scenes of this play. Macbeth has gone far beyond his wife in his willful destruction of his own proper nature. Yet it is the loss of this woman he loved that drives Macbeth to his bleakest meditation, his vision of life as “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” He is now left completely alone to play out his meaningless role.

And he continues to play it out in the final scenes under the influence of the role perversion set up in Act I.¹¹ Macbeth's death is related to the sexual theme, because in giving up his manliness he has become the enemy of natural generation, of all who are “born of woman.” So it is ironic justice that Macduff, the man not born of woman, the man whose birth implied a violent perversion of natural generation, should be the one to cow Macbeth's “better part of man” (V.viii.18) and then to kill him.

When we come to the warring lechers, whores, and idealists of Troilus and Cressida, all the varieties of love-motive I've somewhat arbitrarily listed above appear in one place or another, and by the end of the play the war has made the worst of them dominant. Romantic love is destroyed by the defection of Cressida and the scurvy opinion almost everyone has of Helen (a just opinion, to judge by the effect she makes in her one appearance). Here a classic “love-pair” story, a story of a “secret” love like that of Romeo and Juliet, becomes a story of separation, not of union in death. Cressida's love is more mortal than she. Not love, but a need to be loved is her primary motive. Troilus has Romeo's too-intense romantic idealism without the luck to find a Juliet and so is cheated of his love-death, or indeed of any death at all (but see Rosalind's comment, As You Like It IV.i.85-90). Troilus is jealous even before he and Cressida part (see IV.iv.57-107); in effect he is instructing her to be unfaithful, as if she needs to betray him to justify his expectations of her. Moreover, his sensuality seems to be in his imagination rather than his body:

I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
Th' imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense. What will it be
When that the wat'ry palates taste indeed
Love's thrice-repured nectar? Death, I fear me,
Sounding destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle, potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness
For the capacity of my ruder powers.

(III.ii.16-23)

This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.

(III.ii.74-77)

It is appropriate that Troilus's suffering be mental too. Pandarus, who puts more stake in the act, gets the Neapolitan boneache. Achilles and Patroclus add homosexuality to the varieties of love, Thersites has a filthy mind, and with all the animal imagery in the play one suspects bestiality too. I've even seen a production (Oregon Shakespearean Festival, 1972) where, so we don't miss the point, Helen's ladies-in-waiting go at it on the forestage as Pandarus sings of “Love, love, nothing but love, still love still more!” and the talk turns to love's being apparently “a generation of vipers” (III.i.107, 122-23). And what shape do all these love-motives give to the final scene? A dying pimp, rejected by his best customer, spreads venereal disease among the members of the audience.

The love of Antony and Cleopatra also operates in many modes, if not in the more exotic types found in Troilus and Cressida. There is, for instance, the jealousy of Cleopatra over Octavia and of Antony over Thidias and Octavius; there are the repeated attempts by Cleopatra to use Antony's love to control his actions; there is the sense of lust and hedonistic self-indulgence surrounding the whole affair; there is the change of sexual roles when Cleopatra puts her clothes on Antony and wears his sword; there is the grand romantic stance, assumed by Antony in Act I and taken up by Cleopatra in Act V, which asserts that their love is a greater thing than the Roman Empire. (This is also the only one of the plays we've been considering where the love union is fruitful, an aspect of love in which Macbeth was so painfully frustrated. And yet this fruitfulness is incidental: Antony and Cleopatra simply produce children as a matter of course.)

The comprehensiveness of love here, however, is much different from the kind of comprehensiveness we found in Troilus and Cressida, because here it is concentrated in Antony and Cleopatra. It is unified, not diverse. Because it is unified, the “catalog” treatment I have just given their love is more obviously inadequate than a similar treatment of love in Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare has designed Antony and Cleopatra, from Philo's categorizing speech on (that is, from the opening lines of the play), to make us finally abandon the attempt to categorize. He makes the love of Antony and Cleopatra something we can't describe neatly, as Philo thinks he can do. Moreover, though the final scene of Antony and Cleopatra is like the final scene of Romeo and Juliet in that what is finally achieved is a love union in death (complete with side-by-side graves and eternal fame), the final scene of Antony and Cleopatra is much more complicated because “love” is not the only important motive that gives the scene its structure and because Antony is already dead and Cleopatra is still very much alive and maneuvering.

Shakespeare won't allow Antony and Cleopatra to be easily romanticized as tragic lovers. In the first place, Antony commits suicide as “a bridegroom” and does a messy job of it. Then he is awkwardly heaved aloft to a Cleopatra who refuses to open her monument to him. In all this, of course, Shakespeare is dressing up what he found in North's Plutarch, adding the sexual suggestiveness and underlining rather than removing the absurdity of the situation. The gap between the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra is also from Plutarch, but instead of telescoping time in order to make his play more “dramatically effective,” as he often did in reworking historical material, Shakespeare here exploits the “undramatic” gap in order to give his play an unusual double ending, so that we have “the Tragedy of Antony” ending in IV.xv and “the Tragedy of Cleopatra” ending in V.ii, with Antony no longer on stage. No simple Liebestod here.

8

In the world of Shakespearean tragedy, then, love fails as an associative alternative to the mere organization achieved by the survivors. In the final scenes we see those who can love, or those who could love, die, while those who can merely associate, live. We are left with the separation between tragic figures who die and survivors who continue to live a life that is safer but less rich in possibilities for experience. At the end of King Lear, Edgar says that the life of a survivor, at least in the world of that play, will be neither so long nor so full as that of Lear and Gloucester, who have died:¹²

The oldest hath borne most; we that the young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

(V.iii.326-27)

In general, of course, long life is not required of a tragic hero, but all the tragic figures have seen more, seen more because they tried more, confronted more, than those, of whatever age, who survive. …

Notes

1. See Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 161, and W. B. C. Watkins, Perilous Balance: The Tragic Genius of Swift, Johnson, & Sterne (Cambridge, Mass.: Walker-de Berry, 1960), p. 77. The original source is, according to Watkins, Arthur Murphy (“Essay, Johnson's Works, 1806, I, 124”).

2. Richard II is a particularly interesting case. At first Bolingbroke seems to be the center of disorder, but then we realize, by at least II.i, that it is really Richard who is the threat; then in the rest of Act II and in Act III it's Bolingbroke again, and yet by IV.i Richard is once more the energy which destroys order. This shifting in our feelings about where the energy of the play lies may be simply the result of Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard as a man of either-or tensions, but it may also be characteristic of “historical” disorder, which can be either tragic or comic but resolves dramatically into an order that is accompanied by a more or less precise threat that disorder lies ahead.

3. Some of the notions about comedy in this section are based on Susanne K. Langer, “The Great Dramatic Forms: The Comic Rhythm,” in her Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner's, 1953), pp. 326-50, and Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).

4. The problem of order has been discussed often in connection with Shakespeare's plays, and this is hardly surprising, given the intense interest his contemporaries in Tudor and Stuart England took in the problem. I suspect that most of us get our basic notion of the period's sense of order from E. M. W. Tillyard's well-known and convenient exposition of The Elizabethan World Picture (1943; reprint ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Tillyard's book is of course a starting place, a modest vade mecum for a study of Shakespeare's plays (and, perhaps even more, other literature of the period) and is not an explanation of what actually happens in the plays with respect to the “order” theme. Nor is it true that Elizabethans could not think about the world in other ways; many did. Nevertheless, taken for what it is, Tillyard's account is a useful place to start.

   Among other ways Elizabethans could describe the world's order, Tillyard discusses the “planes” of order, “correspondences” in structure between various spheres of activity in the universe, analogies between microcosm, macrocosm, and body politic. When we come to the plays, it is probably more accurate to speak of “the planes of disorder” than of “the planes of order,” since with drama as with news, order is normally more interesting in the breach than the observance. The set of planes I propose in the text is a bit different from Tillyard's, though consistent with it. I am trying to analyze the structure of the tragedies, not recreate a “normal” Elizabethan way of seeing the universe and its many parts. As a result, my categories are less distinct from one another than his are.

5. Again, because of the peculiar dramatic structure of Richard II, the final scenes show Bolingbroke not so much being an opportunist as facing the consequences of having been one.

6. Brutus is of course the central figure. But Cassius is the one who most appears to increase in complexity, because while it was still Caesar's tragedy Cassius looked more like one of the usual winners. None of the men I've been discussing the last few pages is as high-minded as Brutus. None of them makes a mistake like the one Brutus makes twice with Antony.

7. To say this is to take Hector as a tragic hero. But though his death, as the play's last “event,” occupies the place in the dramatic structure normally given to the tragic figure's death, there are reasons for doubting that Hector is really of “tragic” stature. See below in this section.

8. Cf. Brian Morris, “The Tragic Structure of Troilus and Cressida,” SQ 10 (1959): 481-91, who sees Troilus as a tragic hero. I treat Troilus as a tragic hero too—though not in Morris's way, since I see his heroism as ironic.

9. Though it is part of a large historical pattern, Octavius Caesar's pax romana—see AC IV.vi.5-7—is a very secular, administrative affair compared to the peace established by Richmond or Malcolm.

10. John Holloway, The Story of the Night (1961; reprint ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1963]), has explored this aspect of Shakespearean tragic structure and drawn an anthropological analogy with scapegoat ritual—the tragic hero as repository of society's evils.

11. The one person we see him kill in Act V is specifically someone's son (Siward's) and one who is “born of woman.” See V.vii.5-13. Actually, it might not be apparent on stage that the young man Macbeth kills is “Young Siward,” since he is never so identified in the lines, only in the stage directions and speech prefixes. Perhaps we are supposed to see what he is (a young man) rather than who he is. Or perhaps we would see that his coat of arms identifies him with Old Siward. In V.vii, when Young Siward's death is reported, the point is made that in his death he became a man (39-43).

12. Edgar certainly means Lear and perhaps Gloucester. In the Folio, Edgar uses a singular verb (“the oldest hath borne most”), which might mean that he is referring only to Lear, though Shakespeare is not consistent, by modern standards, in his use of verb number. In Q1, where in fact, the lines are spoken by “Duke” …, there is a plural verb (“the oldest haue borne most”), which would refer to both Lear and Gloucester. But the point I am making is not really affected by which text we choose.