SOURCE: “An Art of Dying,” in The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare's Tragedies, University Press of Kentucky, 1978, pp. 29-71.

[In the essay below, Foreman diagrams the variety of ways in which Shakespeare's tragic protagonists meet their ends. Looking closely at the deaths of the central characters in both the minor and major tragedies, he considers the depth of the characters' understanding of themselves and the world, their sense of identity, their will to be in control of their fates, and the creativity of their confrontations with death.]

I will be a bridegroom in my death.

Death, that first and most obvious characteristic of a Shakespearean tragedy, so often becomes for the tragic figures a thing to be desired. At least from Richard II on, a death wish is either acted on or deeply and extensively felt by nearly all of them. Actually there seems to be an almost absolute distinction between these alternatives: Timon excepted, those central characters who most profoundly wish for death, those characters for whom the death wish becomes a way of life, do not kill themselves. For the tragic figures who do kill themselves, death is desirable as an alternative to shame, to a life that must henceforth be lived on someone else's terms, or to continued existence in a world that no longer has in it a unique person whose death has made it, for the tragic hero, empty of value. This kind of death wish arises fairly suddenly and is fairly soon acted on, for it is a response to specific events, to “accidents.” But the more deeply felt and extensive death wishes are responses to conditions, to the general possibilities of earthly life. This kind of death wish arises not simply from a specific, local grief—though there is that, too—but from an existential grief. It is a desire to escape the pain of life itself and its inherent, nonaccidental conditions. It is a desire for oblivion.

Among the first group, the suicides, there are those who kill themselves when a unique love has become impossible because of the death of the beloved. Romeo and Juliet are comparatively straightforward examples. With Othello, Antony, and Cleopatra, considerations of honor and integrity are also important. We will return to these love-suicides in chapter 5.

The sense of weariness, which is so marked a characteristic of the members of the second group, appears in the suicides, too, but only towards the very end. In them it has no metaphysical resonance. The “Roman fools” Brutus and Cassius are weary. “My bones would rest, / That have but labored to attain this hour” (V.v.41-42), says Brutus, as he prepares to die. But Brutus and Cassius kill themselves in order to remain, in Cassius's earlier words, “masters of their fates.” Their motives in dying are versions of their motives in killing Caesar. Had they defeated Antony and Octavius, they would not be so weary, and at their deaths there is little of the profound relief we feel, with Hamlet, amidst our sorrow, when at last “the rest is silence.”

Coriolanus and Timon, among the heroes of the mature plays, fit least easily into these rough divisions. Coriolanus neither kills himself nor expresses a wish for oblivion. He is so little inclined to introspection that it is difficult to be sure what, if anything, he is thinking as he approaches and meets his death. But when, having realized that he is a man like other men and subject to some of their infirmities, he gives up at his mother's plea his unstoppable campaign against Rome, he sees this act as virtually his death warrant:

                                                            O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But for your son—believe it, O believe it!—
Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,
If not most mortal to him. But let it come.

(V.iii.185-89)

He apparently returns to Corioles accepting his death, though not welcoming it, for once in Corioles he proclaims himself still an agent of the Volscians. Yet when he is goaded by Aufidius, what might have seemed to be Coriolanus's new maturity disappears. And yet again, when he is attacked, the man who had once beaten the whole city single-handed now takes not so much action as Julius Caesar or Hector to avoid death at the hands of a gang. Does he trust in the influence of the temperate Volscian lords (see V.vi.122-26), or does he finally welcome an end to strife? The point may be that the confusion of role we see here (is he the man or the boy?) is the appropriate conclusion to a life unbalanced from the beginning by a confusion of roles—forced to be a man while still a boy, still a boy once he is a man. Now at the end he accepts like a man the implications of his mercy, but denies like a boy that like a boy he granted the mercy.

If Coriolanus falls outside the main groups because he neither kills himself nor expresses a desire for oblivion, Timon is an exception because he does both. He commits suicide (at least in effect) and holds a permanent grudge against life itself, not just a specific event. For someone like Romeo, life would be good again if Juliet were by some miracle still alive. But for Timon no such redeeming event is even imaginable.

The second group, those who see death as a benefit yet refrain from suicide, includes Richard II, Hamlet, Troilus, and Macbeth. Troilus we have already discussed in chapter 1; he leaves the battlefield asking that destruction come quickly. The other three are more meditative in their weariness with life. Beginning with his return to England and powerlessness in Act III, Richard looks forward a number of times to the relief of not having to face the pain of losing his crown, which for him means losing his identity (see III.ii.144-70, III.iii.143-70, IV.i.255-62). His wishing for oblivion culminates when he is in prison, where he generalizes his case to include all men:

                                                                      … whate'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.

(V.v.38-41)

Though working of course from their own experience, Hamlet and Macbeth go far beyond Richard in the philosophical reach of their disillusionment with the world and their wish that all experience would cease. Hamlet’s long affair with death—the most intense in Shakespeare—is part of the subject of chapter 3, where I will consider it in detail.

Much is promised to Macbeth, but what he gets is not what he thought it would be and not worth the suffering he has invested in it. In fact, it is not worth anything. But Macbeth is more than simply disappointed about the bad turn his life has taken; he comes to doubt that life can be otherwise than worthless. Early in Act V, when power is slipping away from him, Scotland is a chaos, and his wife is mad, Macbeth still feels that one might get from life that which he, because of his acts, will not; and because he has no longer any hope of getting it, he wishes to die:

I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

(V.iii.22-28)

Two scenes later, when the invading army has grown larger and advanced further, when a siege is imminent, and when, finally, Lady Macbeth dies, Macbeth has come to feel that life can be no other way. Whether the Queen dies now or “hereafter” makes no difference. Life is a meaningless succession of days, leading only to death, which he wishes would come: “Out, out, brief candle!” (V.v.23). For Macbeth the world has not even so much meaning as an unweeded garden, and he makes his ultimate uncreative gesture, wishing that chaos were come again:

I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish th' estate o' th' world were now undone.

(49-50)

In King Lear two characters carry on over several scenes what is in effect a debate about the merits of suicide, and a third character feels the pain of existence as strongly as Hamlet or Macbeth. In Act IV, Gloucester begins like the suicides we have examined. Blinded and alone, betrayed by the son he trusted and having cast off the son who loved him, Gloucester wants to take the quickest way to Dover and die by falling off the cliff. He commissions a mad beggar to guide him there, but though he doesn't know it, the beggar is his loyal son, Edgar, in disguise. I said a moment ago that if by some miracle Juliet had turned out to be alive (or, in practical terms, if Friar Lawrence's message had got through), Romeo would no longer have wished to kill himself. Gloucester tells us right away what the miracle would be in his case: “O dear son Edgar, / … Might I but live to see thee in my touch / I'ld say I had eyes again!” (IV.i.21-24). Since he has no hope of that, he wishes to die. Edgar, who has this miracle in his power, refuses to grant it because he disapproves of his father's attitude. Instead, he keeps Gloucester alive but ignorant, and as a result Gloucester becomes more and more like the characters we have been discussing who wish to die, who wish for oblivion, yet continue to exist in a world without hope. (I will examine the relationship between Gloucester and Edgar in more detail in chapter 4.)

Lear himself, like Hamlet and Macbeth, tries to come to terms with the meaning of existence, and like them he suffers terribly while doing so, like them suffers beyond the capacity of the other characters in these plays. But unlike them, he never cherishes death. It's not that he rejects the idea of suicide, as Edgar does. For Lear, the question of to be or not to be simply never comes up.

Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear—these are the characters with whom the pain of existence goes further beyond the pain of their own existence to the pain of human existence. The spheres in which Antony and, even more, Othello suffer, however powerfully, are more limited. Timon, it is true, extends his indictment of man and of life as far as anyone, but his rage seems too mechanical, too much a stance, finally too simple, to be comparable in effect to that of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear. The other figures we have been examining are less comprehensive in their suffering than these three. And not one of the three commits suicide. They either get over their death wish (Hamlet and Macbeth, though in very different ways) or they never experience it (Lear). Do these three men learn something or achieve a maturity that the others don't? Do they reach a “perception”?

2

Perception, sudden illumination, a moment of knowledge or recognition, a new clarity of vision, anagnorisis—these are various ways of describing what a central figure may arrive at late in a tragedy, and thus a character's movement toward perception may shape the final scenes in important ways. But we must be careful. The end of any play is likely to involve illumination or recognition as the dramatic knot is untied and the play's problem is solved. Is there anything we can call “tragic perception” or “tragic recognition” and is it a common characteristic of the final scenes of Shakespeare's tragedies? In general terms, yes. Tragic perception is the version of dramatic perception found in a tragedy—the tragic hero realizes how parts of his experience fit together, the tragic hero realizes something about the way the world works, the tragic hero realizes where he went wrong, the tragic hero realizes he can no longer live life on his own terms and so must make a decisive action, and so forth. But he may equally well not realize these things and the play may still be a tragedy.¹

The primary question is not “What does the tragic hero learn?” but “What does the tragic hero experience?” If King Lear is more profound than Othello, it's not because Lear learns more than Othello or because what he learns is of higher quality. It's rather because in his pilgrimage through five acts of pain he engages a wider range of human experience than Othello, or, to recall the terms used earlier, he stirs up and encounters disorder on more levels. This may make his experience more profound, but I don't think it makes it more tragic. In other words, I wouldn't use quality of perception as a defining characteristic of the genre “Shakespearean tragedy.” To insist that a character in a tragedy must learn the truth about something profound is Rymerism. It's moralist criticism. It implies that the point of tragedy is to learn something, that dramatic meaning is the same as didactic meaning. And after all, I suppose good wives should take good care of their linen. But lessons of this sort are trivial, no matter how important the subject. I don't suppose one should murder one's wife either. These are lessons any moralist can supply, and Shakespeare, like life, is full of them. They are not the point.

This doesn't mean, on the other hand, that Shakespeare's tragedies are not about moral problems, nor does it mean that we can't learn anything from them. Johnson, who understood Shakespeare so well even when he objected most strenuously, saw lack of serious moral concern as Shakespeare's gravest fault:

His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose. From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be selected, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally; but his precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong and at the close dismisses them without further care and leaves their examples to operate by chance.²

This description is pretty fair; it makes Shakespeare sound like life. The difference is that Shakespeare has more art than life does, so that he shows us moral problems without as many irrelevancies as we find in nature and thus shows them in a way that makes their complexities easier to see. This is his “moral purpose,” at least to judge from the plays. The tragedies give us the experience of moral problems, but rarely any solutions that aren't trivial. (Even Richard III, accidentally perhaps, is complicated by the fact that Richard is so much more vital than Richmond.) The complex problems he does solve are dramatic, that is, artistic.

That neat moral lessons are not the point of the plays doesn't mean we shouldn't make moral judgments about the characters. Making such judgments is properly part of the experience of a morally complex world—whether life's or Shakespeare's. Abandoning moral distinctions is as bad as making distinctions that are too simple. Either course means stopping, giving up, while the thing to do is go on, and go back, and go on again, through the complex world. This is one of the things we should be doing when we write about Shakespeare and when we scribble sarcastic question marks in the margins of someone else's piece of Shakespeare criticism—and when we come back two years later, erase the question marks from the other fellow's stuff and scribble them beside our own (with more sympathy, of course). Perceptions come and go. The moral structures of the world and Shakespeare stay complex.

Perception is a formal element in the final scenes, like suicide, takeover by a new order, or death, and as with the others, Shakespeare uses it in a variety of ways. A tragic hero's perception may be profound; it may have been achieved before the final scenes; it may be contradicted by his actions; it may be ironic, trivial, or pointedly absent. It is to the various uses of perception as a structural device that I now turn.

In Titus, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet the use of tragic perception in the hero is comparatively uninteresting. Titus is a single-minded revenger right to his death, Richard comes to a fairly predictable recognition of his guilt and its range, and Romeo and Juliet accept the implications of an absolute love. It is probably not coincidental that these are the earliest of the tragedies. As he moved into the second half of the 1590s, Shakespeare apparently began to make perception more than simply a necessary part of any dramatic structure. He began to exploit perception as a significant (not merely a customary) tragic device.

In Richard II Shakespeare makes virtually explicit use of tragic perception, for he gives Richard, early in his death scene, a long soliloquy in which the deposed king tries to put the pieces of his life together. In moralizing the break of rhythm in a piece of music, Richard shows that he now accepts what Gaunt and York were trying to make him understand back in Act II, before Bolingbroke's return:

Ha—ha—keep time! How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But, for the concord of my state and time,
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

(V.v.42-49)

But Richard, as self-indulgent in grief as he was in power, cannot stop there. He must elaborate the moral anatomically (“For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock” [50]), and he goes on to tell us in great detail how the analogy works. Then, having done this, he returns to a clear recognition that he is doing now what he has always done:

                                                            But my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack of the clock.

(58-60)

He ends in contradiction, both infuriated by the enforcer of the moral and grateful for the love that tried, if ineptly, to bring him harmony.

What finally ennobles Richard is not his perception, not his self-recognition, not what he learns. What ennobles him is his isolation and the fact that though he does learn through his suffering, he cannot ever use what he has learned. I don't mean that he has no opportunity to escape and try again. I mean that he cannot make what he learns more than an intellectual part of himself. He cannot change, but must always “stand fooling” there. It may be this useless clarity, finally, which is the most tragic thing about Richard. He does not lose his crown because he is naïve, even about the power of his crown. Richard's intellectual clarity appears throughout the play in his assessment of Bolingbroke (I.i, II.i, III.iii, IV.i), but it does him no good because it has no effect on his own irresponsible action and because it actually forces Bolingbroke to move more quickly in taking power and putting Richard where we see him in V.v, in prison.³ And in prison, with no one but himself to contend with, his clarity of vision only drives him back into the self-indulgent exercise of language which since Bolingbroke's takeover has necessarily replaced his self-indulgent exercise of power.

Brutus and Coriolanus are, except for Cleopatra, the most silent of Shakespeare's tragic heroes in the sense that they almost never let us hear their deepest thoughts, if they have any. In Brutus this is an effect partly of his Stoicism, partly of his absolute belief in his honesty. In him, tragic perception is notable by its absence. Once he has gulled himself with an analogy (II.i.10-34), or, to put it more kindly, decided that Caesar is a threat to Roman freedom because of what he might do in the future, we see no more of those moments when he is “vexed … with passions of some difference” and “with himself at war” (I.ii.39-40, 46). Brutus refuses, so far as we can tell, to perceive even the need to reexamine his deeds. He never questions the rightness of the course he has taken. He never questions his ideals, even when they have led to civil war, his own defeat, and the victory of the very tyranny he had originally acted to prevent, a tyranny we never see under Julius Caesar, a tyranny which is now present, not future.

Coriolanus's silence is not so complete. In lines that are apparently spoken “aside,” he threatens perception but then retreats into the absolute:

My wife comes foremost; then the honored mould
Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand
The grandchild to her blood. But out, affection!
All bond and privilege of nature, break!
Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.
What is that curt'sy worth? or those doves' eyes,
Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not
Of stronger earth than others. …
                                                                      Let the Volsces
Plough Rome and harrow Italy! I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.

(V.iii.22-29, 33-37)

Coriolanus, at least, is “with himself at war.” When finally he does melt, in lines we have already considered, he sees this relenting as likely to be fatal to him. A tragic perception seems to lie behind this; but we never learn what it is, and when he returns to Corioles he apparently expects fair treatment, even praise, not death. With its inarticulateness, its suggested alternation of mature recognition and adolescent stubbornness, its swings between shrewdness and naïveté, Coriolanus's mode of perception seems appropriate to the tragic hero in whom the struggle between boyhood and manhood was never resolved.

Troilus and Timon provide us with clear examples of ironic perception. In V.ii Troilus sees that Cressida is false and thus arrives at the perception that all women are false. In V.x he has seen that Hector is slain and thus arrives at the perception that the war should become more bloody and violent than ever. In the middle of Act III Timon thinks he learns, and he changes. But he changes only superficially. Fundamentally he learns nothing. He is as absolute as ever and is incapable of perceiving the unique nature of his three principal visitors in the woods, Alcibiades, Apemantus, and Flavius, three men who are foils to his notion of “man.” Timon regards even Flavius not as a man but as an absolute, in this case the exception that proves the rule.

In marked contrast to Timon, Antony accepts uniqueness, the uniqueness of Cleopatra, and that acceptance is his perception or recognition. It is all the more noble and tragic and wonderful for being instinctive. He has passed beyond “learning,” the most trivial form of perception, to immediate apprehension of the truth.

Antony's perception, and his tragedy, depend a great deal on the nature of Cleopatra. Cleopatra is an even more “silent” tragic figure than Brutus or Coriolanus. Shakespeare never directly presents what goes on below her “public” surface. She has no soliloquies at all, no asides. We see and hear what the world—including Antony—sees and hears. At several points in Acts III and IV Antony seems to be wrong about Cleopatra, but given Cleopatra's character one can't be sure. She could have betrayed him, even if in fact she hasn't. It is apparently one of her traits to consider seriously every possibility offered her, to ask somewhere in her mind what a given action might bring her. (This trait does much to shape V.ii.) What we can see in Acts III and IV is a repeated pattern of rejection and acceptance. No matter how mad Antony becomes, he always comes back:

Fall not a tear, I say: one of them rates
All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss;
Even this repays me.

(III.xi.69-71)

The simple diction of his returns is always a moving contrast to the purple splendor of his rages.

For Antony the final scenes of the tragedy come in Act IV. In IV.xiv he receives the false news of Cleopatra's death. Knowing that she is dead, having less than ever to live for, he asks Eros to kill him, but Eros kills himself. Antony then sees himself as a learner and stabs himself:

Thou teachest me, O valiant Eros, what
I should, and thou couldst not. My queen and Eros
Have by their brave instruction got upon me
A nobleness in record.
                                                            … Eros,
Thy master dies thy scholar. To do thus
I learned of thee.

(96-99, 101-3)

Laboring under a false “recognition” (Cleopatra's true love of him, from which she died), Antony is even now a poor pupil; he does his work ill in comparison to the efficient Eros. But it is when Diomedes brings the true report that Antony shows his real stature, his mastery. The recognition in itself is nothing, trivial, but his mode of recognition is impressive. When Diomedes gives his news and says he fears he has come too late, Antony replies very simply:

Too late, good Diomed.

(128)

He shows no rage, no reproach towards Cleopatra, and no regret, either here or in the next scene, when he is taken to her monument. His acceptance is a recognition of her uniqueness, a uniqueness that includes the kind of petty thing she has just done. He loves her for that, too, and his acceptance is a final assertion that their love is on a higher level of value than the Roman lands. This assertion here lacks the touch of bombast it had in Act I (i.33-40). Here it is tragic.

When I began my discussion of “tragic” perception, I had been examining Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, those men who range furthest in questioning the order of things and who seem to us the most comprehensive in their suffering, and yet who either reject suicide or never consider it. I ended by asking whether these three men learn something or achieve a maturity that the other tragic heroes do not. And I might ask further whether they reach what we could call “superior” perception. I think not, not as a group anyway. Antony, for instance, achieves as much maturity as any of them. In Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth perception is important as a formal element, but that may be as far as we can generalize, because the actual relation of perception to form is so different in each play.

Of all Shakespeare's tragic heroes Hamlet and Lear seem to be most consciously in search of perception, of illumination. In their final scenes (and here I mean specifically Hamlet V.ii and King Lear V.iii) we see that they have consolidated their experience into an acceptance of what the world has offered them. They each offer what amounts to a statement of their acceptance, their recognition. (See Hamlet V.ii.208-13 and King Lear V.iii.8-26.) But that is as far as the similarity goes. Hamlet's actions right up to the end are consistent with his new stability of soul. Lear, on the other hand, when he returns to the stage with Cordelia dead in his arms, is once again torn apart, showing no trace of his “perception.” He ignores anything he might have learned as completely as he ignores the possibility of suicide. He is out of touch again, ignoring the people around him. He has become again the proud, tormented, self-absorbed, questioning, testy, pitiful old man of the first four acts. Lear may have learned something along the way, but it isn't reflected in the scene of his death (V.iii.258ff.).

Macbeth concludes in V.v that life is meaningless. Nothing happens to him afterwards to change his mind or to redeem the world in his eyes. This clear vision of life is the general form of Macbeth's perception; it is the result of a long series of specific perceptions, those repeated disillusionments about the oracular promises which have been made to him. The series continues into the final confrontation with Macduff, confirming his general belief.

But is Macbeth right? Or is he at least not demonstrably wrong? Maybe. I suspect that such a vision would not be clearly wrong in the other mature tragedies, but once more the special nature of the new order in Macbeth is important. The fact that Malcolm, Macduff, and the rest achieve a political and moral unity associated with life-giving forces suggests that Macbeth's view of life is simply tainted, sick, like Scotland under his rule. It suggests that instead of being more perceptive than his enemies he is simply self-abused (cf. III.iv.142), that he is ironically deceived in his vision of life just as he is in the conclusions to be drawn from the witches' predictions, that he has turned life inside out: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” By the standards of the play he is in, Macbeth seems to be wrong, perverse. The good life was possible under Duncan, exists in England under Edward the Confessor, and will be possible again in Scotland under Malcolm. We see here the importance of the new order in which the tragic disaster is set: it is Macbeth, not the nature of things, that has robbed his life of meaning—his life, not life in general.

And yet Macbeth finally does not act as if life were meaningless and he wished the candle would go out. His instincts, apparently, rebel against the logical conclusion of his perception. He rejects suicide in favor of continued destruction of life:

Why should I play the Roman fool and die
On mine own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes
Do better upon them.

(V.viii.1-3)

His motive here does not seem to be humanitarian; that is, he is not rescuing men from meaninglessness. Rather, he may envy these men; he cannot bear to see lives that have purpose, as these lives so clearly do. When he meets Macduff, and perceives the last equivocation of the “juggling fiends,” he still does not seek death, nor will he yield his life into the power of another. He seeks victory:

… I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries “Hold, enough!”

(V.viii.32-34)

Macbeth dies in opposition not only to Macduff and Malcolm and men of women born, not only to all order, but also to what he has learned about life, to his perception. He goes on as if life, his life, means something, as if it were worth too much to give it to a Malcolm. After concluding that life is meaningless, Macbeth gives his own life meaning by continuing in it as long as he can.

I have saved the problem of Othello's “tragic perception” for last because, as far as Shakespearean criticism is concerned, this may be the most celebrated case. In his well-known, provocative, and perceptive essay on “Senecan” attitudes in Elizabethan drama, T. S. Eliot uses Othello's final long speech as his primary example of a self-deceiving self-dramatization which he identifies as an Elizabethan adaptation of the original Senecan “tragic” stance:⁴

Soft you! a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't.
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their med'cinable gum. Set you down this.
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th' throat the circumcised dog
And smote him—thus.
                                                                                                    He stabs himself.

(V.ii.339-57)

In Eliot's view, Othello's real, though unconscious, purpose in this speech is not to set down the truth about his life but to make himself feel better about how it has turned out:

I have always felt that I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness—of universal human weakness—than the last great speech of Othello. … It is usually taken on its face value, as expressing the greatness in defeat of a noble but erring nature. [At this point Eliot quotes the speech.] What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself. Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatizing himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself. I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.⁵

I accept the last sentence here (though I don't believe it is illustrated by this speech of Othello's). And I agree with Eliot that the point of the speech is not to express “the greatness in defeat of a noble but erring nature.” (The speech may or may not express such greatness but to see that as the point would be to trivialize it.) But, in saying that Othello at this point is “adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude,” Eliot seems to be claiming that what is required of Othello at this moment is the adoption of a moral attitude, and in doing this Eliot would seem to be making the same kind of assumption that we saw Johnson make about Shakespeare in general, that Shakespeare “seems to write without any moral purpose.” Both Johnson and Eliot apparently assume that aesthetic stances and moral stances must be distinct, that an aesthetic stance can not in fact be a moral stance in the most profound sense. On the contrary, aesthetic stances do have moral value, and later in this chapter I will return to the nature of Othello’s aesthetic attitude here and its moral implications. For the moment, let us simply note that Eliot would, after all, appear to be drawing moral conclusions from Othello's aesthetic stance. In other words Eliot treats the speech as if it expressed, unconsciously, a moral attitude. But even taken as purely a moral assertion, Othello's speech does seem to me to be a just assessment of Othello's career—a balanced statement of reality, not an attempt “to escape reality,” as Eliot claims. The speech is indeed not a moment of “perception,” but I think it is the result of a sound perception and thus ultimately an expression of one.

Othello sums up his case as that “Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; / Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme.” The problem is that Othello has behaved rather oddly for one who loved well and who was not easily jealous. But Othello is saying what he feels, and I think it is an accurate statement about the conflict of passions in the play we have just seen. Because of her powerful appeal to Othello's senses, Desdemona had gotten under the armor of self-confidence and self-sufficiency which had always protected him in times of crisis. Othello's jealousy is lack of confidence in himself. His cry of “Cuckold me” (IV.i.196) shows habitual self-esteem confronted with evidence that he is not esteemed. Iago works by undermining Othello's self-confidence and by arousing his strong sensual imagination, as in that cruelest of lines, “With her, on her; what you will” (IV.i.34), which sends Othello into his trance. The important thing to observe is the rare power needed to reach the nearly inaccessible (heretofore invulnerable) core of Othello's being, from whence his great passions break. This power is Desdemona's, not Iago's. Iago merely exploits it. The whole play testifies to Othello's previous self-containment at all times. Even now, he says, “But that I love the gentle Desdemona, / I would not my unhoused free condition / Put into circumscription and confine / For the sea's worth” (I.ii.25-28). The best account of the strong appeal of Desdemona's “parts and graces” and their impact on Othello's self is his own:

                                                                      Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction, had they rained
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head,
Steeped me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes,
I should have found in some place of my soul
A drop of patience. But, alas, to make me
A fixed figure for the time of scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!
Yet could I bear that too; well, very well.
But there where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in—turn thy complexion there,
Patience, thou young and rose-lipped cherubin!
Ay, there look grim as hell!

(IV.ii.47-64)

Othello “loved not wisely but too well” because when he did finally engage his passions, he lost all control of them, and he was “not easily jealous” because the object was not easily found which could so engage his passions. (No one has ever doubted that he was “perplexed in the extreme.”) It is not necessary to pay such attention to these lines when Othello delivers them because they are no flash of insight. They indicate neither presence nor absence of “tragic” perception. They express Othello's character as the rest of the play has presented it.

Othello's important perception, his actual recognition of truth, comes earlier and is very simple: he was gulled. This is a trivial perception, but it is sufficient. It is an important shaping element in the final scene. Again, Othello best expresses the perception: “O fool, fool, fool!” (324).

Helen Gardner, in a footnote to her remarks on the use of historical criticism in looking at Hamlet, comments on Eliot's view of self-dramatizing death-speeches and relates Othello's speech to a “historical” genre:

Mr. Eliot's general complaint about the death-scenes of Elizabethan tragic heroes, whose apologias he ascribes to the influence of Seneca, ignores the historical fact that this was an age of public executions in which men were judged by the courage and dignity with which they met public death, and when it was thought proper that at this supreme moment of their lives they should submit their case to the judgement of their fellow-men.⁶

Othello's speech, then, is a putting of his case before the Venetian public (though it is more than that), and, as Eliot observes, he is not the only tragic hero to make this sort of presentation. Since speeches like this naturally fall in the final scenes, we come to another important element in the structure of these scenes—the tragic hero's assertion of self.

3

Assertion of self, or (what lies behind it) a strong sense of self, does much more to give a play a feeling of tragedy than perception does. The assertion of separateness which it involves is never a major structural influence in comedy, or at least not in Shakespearean comedy, where the final scenes assert union centrally. (Love's Labor's Lost is the exception.) In the tragedies the separateness dominates, in our response, the new order (union) against which it is set. Only in Romeo and Juliet, among the tragedies, does a union seem to be at the center of the structure of the final scene. Romeo and Juliet assert their identity, their integrity, by a merging of selves in a sexual union, a consummation in death. As in comedy, love conquers all.⁷ This doesn't happen in Troilus and Cressida. It is one of the things that happens in Antony and Cleopatra, but because Antony is absent from the final scene, it happens by means of a far more complicated process, in which Cleopatra, not the union, is central.

One form tragic self-assertion takes, one that, in a sense, we have already looked at, is self-justification, a desire by the tragic hero that his story be judged correctly, that it be accurate to the facts, that it not be biased in favor of the most recent developments. (Of course, this attitude takes it for granted that the tragic hero's career is worth remembering in the first place. This assumption too is part of the tragic sense of self.) We have already examined the case of Othello. Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Antony offer us versions of the same device. Hamlet hasn't the time to tell his own story, as Othello does, so he entrusts the job to Horatio:

                                                                      Horatio, I am dead;
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied. …
O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

(V.ii.327-29, 333-38)

Coriolanus is rushed too, but it is his self-assertion that helps to bring on his death. He lacks the balance of Othello, Hamlet, and Antony. Goaded by Aufidius, Coriolanus utters in Corioles those parts of his story that will make it easier for the conspirators to get away with killing him:

                    Your judgments, my grave lords,
Must give this cur [Aufidius] the lie; and his own notion—
Who wears my stripes impressed upon him, that
Must bear my beating to his grave—shall join
To thrust the lie unto him. …
Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. Boy? False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it. Boy?

(V.vi.104-8, 110-15)

With Antony, we find a fourth kind of self-justification, for he makes his plea for a just assessment of his life neither to the public nor to someone he directs to make it to the public. He speaks only to Cleopatra:

The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes,
Wherein I lived the greatest prince o' th' world,
The noblest: and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman. A Roman, by a Roman
Valiantly vanquished.

(IV.xv.51-58)

The self-justifying speech naturally implies a strong self-image, but the absence of such a speech hardly means that the tragic hero lacks a strong self-image. The self-image may be conscious or unconscious. It is conscious in the case of Cleopatra, who stages the elaborate ritual of V.ii in order to assert her integrity as woman, as wife, as queen, as tragic heroine. The best example of the unconscious assertion of heroic self-image is Macbeth, who by his final act instinctively claims his worth in spite of his declared belief in the valuelessness of all life. Gardner observes that Shakespeare has made this Thane of Cawdor a contrast to his predecessor, who, it is reported (I.iv.3-11), made the “just” death-speech expected of a nobleman.⁸

One kind of dying stance found often in the tragic literature of the sixteenth century and earlier seems to have been regarded by Shakespeare as something of a joke—the mirror, the warning, the tragic figure pointing to himself in his fall as a moral lesson.⁹ At least, none of Shakespeare's greatest tragic heroes sees himself as a mirror. When Shakespeare does use the mirror notion, its effect is almost always local, not structural, and it is likely to appear in ironic contexts. Cleopatra, for instance, apparently mocks Caesar with it during their exchange of diplomacy:¹⁰

                    See, Caesar: O, behold,
How pomp is followed! Mine will now be yours,
And should we shift estates, yours would be mine. …
Be it known that we, the greatest, are misthought
For things that others do; and, when we fall,
We answer others' merits in our name,
Are therefore to be pitied.

(V.ii.150-52, 176-79)

I think there are only two examples of characters adopting the “warning” stance in an important, structural way. The clearest example is the extremely ironic one of Pandarus, who, in what is essentially a dying speech at the end of the play …, holds himself up in his fall as a mirror for all his “Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade” (V.x.50). The other is Timon:

… let my gravestone be your oracle.
Lips, let sour words go by and language end.
What is amiss, plague and infection mend!
Graves only be men's works, and death their gain.
Sun, hide thy beams; Timon hath done his reign.

(V.i.217-21)

Timon sees himself here as a king who wants his dying declaration, the epitaph on his gravestone, to teach men a moral lesson. But what a lesson—shut up and die off as fast as possible, following his example! The contradictory statements in the epitaph read in V.iv (“Seek not my name … Here lie I, Timon”) combine the moral lesson that all things human should be obliterated with the self-assertion of the dying tragic hero who, like Hamlet, Othello, and Antony, is concerned that his name be remembered and his story viewed with balanced eye.¹¹ We are to remember that “Timon … alive all living men did hate,” that for him there was no balance. Ironically for Timon, Alcibiades seems well on the way to giving him the just and truly balanced assessment that an Othello, a Hamlet, or an Antony would have desired.

4

Alcibiades' explanation of Timon's gravesite on the sea is that “rich conceit / Taught [him] to make vast Neptune weep for aye / On [his] low grave, on faults forgiven” (V.iv.77-79). Yet Timon seems to have had in mind a kind of eternal daily laceration and a situation that catches symbolically the restlessness of his soul and his desire for an ambiguous oblivion:

Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat
Thy gravestone daily.

(IV.iii.375-76)

Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.

(V.i.212-16)

In any case, it is clear that Timon has chosen a place of death that is symbolically rich—the point where sea and land crash together, a point of ceaseless opposition appropriate to Timon's “latter spirits” (V.iv.74), his hatred for humanity, his constant contradiction even of himself. Timon's death itself must be considered a suicide: death by simple refusal to live. The simplicity of this opposition, too, suits his character well, as does the fact that the death occurs offstage, for Timon now wishes to avoid entirely the sight of men, the public show, and Shakespeare makes the suicide of Timon so private that not even the theater audience can witness it. Timon goes away from all men, all life.

The choice, as by Timon, of a symbolically appropriate death is a form of tragic self-assertion that we find in all those plays where the tragic figures commit suicide. “Rich conceit,” to use Alcibiades' phrase, teaches these characters to give their deaths a shape that expresses their sense of the quality of their lives. Sometimes this rich conceit is a conscious exercise of imaginative power; sometimes it is apparently instinctive. Sometimes the shape the character wants to give his life is suggested by metaphors alone, sometimes by metaphors elaborated into parable or personal ritual. Romeo, for instance, as he prepares to drink the poison, is perhaps not aware that he uses again the images he used as he went to the Capulet feast where he first met Juliet (compare I.iv.106-13 and V.iii.109-18); but he does observe a brief ritual in drinking the poison as a toast to Juliet:

Here's to my love! O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

(119-20)

Again, Juliet is not conscious of repeating either Romeo's life-sex-death metaphors or (with “poison” replacing “sin”) the exchange of kisses from their first meeting (I.v.103-10):¹²

O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative.

(163-66)

Nor is she aware of the symbolic significance of the language she uses at the very moment of suicide (a moment when dramatic word and deed are united), but her intuition of the forces within Romeo and herself that have led them to this tomb now leads her to the happy metaphor that makes her marriage to Romeo complete and final:

                                                                                O happy dagger!
This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.

(169-70)

In all these lines the two characters' imaginations are bringing forth images and romantic gestures appropriate to the story of a couple that prefers sexual union to life and thus finally can find consummation only in death.

In rushing, as Cleopatra says, “into the secret house of death / Ere death dare come to us” (IV.xv.81-82), the tragic figures who kill themselves are not only choosing their own death rather than letting others choose it for them (or what would, in their opinion, be worse, letting others choose for them an unacceptable life), but also they are choosing the manner of their death, the style.¹³ They are declaring that their death shall be an extension of their life, rather than its negation, that death is not an uncharacteristic accident but a final assertion of the power to give personal shape to life.

In contrast to the kind of self-justifying speech we examined earlier, in which the man about to die tries to set the record straight with those who will go on living, the self-assertive suicide appeals not to the reason but to the imagination, and correspondingly the language that gives the suicides their style usually depends not on balance (“Nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice”) but on metaphor (“I will be / A bridegroom in my death”). The language of suicide is witness not to the facts of life but to its poetry. The characters who use this language are not so much concerned that their true story be remembered by their survivors as that in dying they be true to themselves.

With both Antony and Othello we can see a character use one of these modes of self-assertion and then the other. Antony, in IV.xiv, where he actually gives himself his mortal wound, makes his suicide a wedding night: “I will be / A bridegroom in my death, and run into't / As to a lover's bed” (99-101). Here he is not the valiant Roman who would rather die than be shamed in capture but rather the man who would give “all for love,” the man who would be shamed not to give all as Cleopatra (he thinks) and Eros have done.¹⁴ Later, in IV.xv, where he finally dies, he brings together the two spheres of his accomplishments—the lover in the reunion with Cleopatra, the movement aloft into her monument, and the final kiss; and the great Roman conqueror in his declaration as he is brought in that “Not Caesar's valor hath o'erthrown Antony, / But Antony's hath triumphed on itself” (14-15), and in the balanced, soberly worded speech (51-58) we examined earlier in which he asks Cleopatra to remember his life in proper proportion. (The one metaphor in this speech—“feed”—is not central to what he is saying and does not refer to Antony's view of himself or his actions.) At least in this play Shakespeare sees the speech justifying one's life, setting one's life in order, as a peculiarly Roman genre. The Romans are making them constantly, Cleopatra virtually never. The use of visual spectacle, of image and symbol, on the other hand, seems to be Egyptian. (Consider Cleopatra on her barge, for instance.) Thus as Antony dies in Cleopatra's arms, in her monument, speaking of being “a Roman, by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished,” he is verbally a Roman, visually an Egyptian. Cleopatra, when she dies, will be concerned mostly with image in both spectacle and word.

Othello, in the middle of his final long speech (V.ii.339-57), changes significantly from one mode of self-assertion to another, from the plea for a balanced assessment of his whole life to the metaphorically powerful suicide itself. The former appears in the balanced phrasing of the speech up to “Set you down this” (352), the latter in the anecdote, with its “bloody period,” about the incident in Aleppo. It is clear in the context of the whole last scene that Othello's suicide is part of an elaborate ritual. In fact, Othello creates two rituals in the final scene, the second (the suicide) reversing the moral structure of the first (the murder of Desdemona). I will examine these rituals in detail in chapter 5. For the moment, it is important to see what Othello is doing with his anecdote about the Turk in Aleppo. Most immediately he seems to be reporting a minor incident as if it were to be remembered as a major accomplishment of the Moorish general who has “done the state some service”; this would tend to suggest that Othello is ironically undercutting the greatness of the general. But Othello's real purpose in telling the story becomes apparent when he stabs himself at the end of it. Now we realize that the anecdote is an extended metaphor, a parable in which both the Turk and “I” are Othello. The parable first makes a distinction between the Christian servant of the Venetian state, who loved Desdemona, and the presumptuous infidel who killed her; but the parable also shows, in the image of self-killing that ends it, Othello's recognition that these two are one, that he cannot, like Hamlet to Laertes, speak of another self who was Othello's enemy too. No, even more than with Antony, the death of Othello shows a tragic figure accepting his wholeness—in this case the capacity for love being inseparable from the capacity for hate.

Othello's final speech shows particularly well another important quality of the language of suicide and demonstrates the way its kind of self-assertion—its revelation of the character's sense of self—differs from the speech of self-justification. The speech of self-justification refers away from the dramatic moment in which it is uttered, away to other times and other places, either to the past in which the speaker performed his deeds or to the future in which they are to be remembered and reported. The language of suicide, on the contrary, usually brings everything down to the moment it is uttered.¹⁵ Everything in the person's life is brought to bear on the deed we see and hear at that moment—the taking of the life. This is nowhere more evident than in Othello's use of the Aleppo incident. Having requested his hearers to “Speak of me as I am,” he has been talking about his career, especially about the recent past, so full of “unlucky deeds.” With his offhand “And say besides that in Aleppo once” Othello lulls his audience into thinking that he is continuing to talk about the past, an even more distant past. But by stabbing himself Othello suddenly makes us realize that he is now using the past as a metaphor, or a parable, for what is taking place in the present. Two people, a distant place, a far-off time, a punishing blow—“Turk” (or “dog”), “I,” “Aleppo,” “once,” “smote”—are poetic tools for describing one man acting here and now. Like Juliet's “dagger” and “sheath,” Antony's “lover's bed,” or Timon's seaside grave, the Aleppo incident is a character's way of expressing his sense of the essential truth about the life that has brought him to this present, this moment of death.¹⁶

And when we consider the end of this speech as it occurs on a stage, a unity of word and deed, we recognize that the language of suicide is a language of act as well as of word, of visual image as well as of verbal image. The words alone may seem to allow a separation of the “dog” and the general, the bad and the good. But the words are not alone. Othello utters them in a visual context that insists on their unity—the Othello who kills is the Othello who dies, the Othello we see and hear, the only Othello there is.

If Antony and Othello are interesting for using both the speech of self-justification and the ritual suicide, Brutus is remarkable for using neither, remarkable because earlier he had insisted so strongly on performing the murder of Caesar as a ritual and had delivered an elaborate speech of self-justification to the Roman mob.¹⁷ To be sure, Brutus, in killing himself, does see his suicide in relation to the murder of Caesar, as does his “brother” Cassius. But there is an ironic difference between the ways these two men make the connection. Brutus had said earlier (in his speech of self-justification) that he would turn the dagger that stabbed Caesar on himself if Rome ever needed his death (III.ii.44-46).¹⁸ But when he does kill himself, he does not explicitly use the same dagger; he merely compares the two slayings: “Caesar now be still. / I killed not thee with half so good a will” (V.v.50-51). Cassius, on the other hand, who was less interested in making the assassination a ritual, makes his own death a ritual of symbolic retribution:

Now be a freeman, and with this good sword,
That ran through Caesar's bowels, search this bosom.
… Caesar, thou are revenged
Even with the sword that killed thee.

(V.iii.41-42, 45-46)

Brutus needed ritual to hide, from himself more than from others, the true nature of the assassination, but now, dying, he neither doubts his moral superiority nor imagines anyone else can doubt it; that superiority itself justifies the acts of his life and the manner of his death. Cassius, on the other hand, saw the nature of the assassination more clearly; it was an act that might call for revenge.¹⁹ And now, consonant with his new belief in “things that do presage” (V.i.78), his new belief that events are morally as well as physically connected, he wants to make his death symbolically appropriate to his life.

The most elaborate, prudently prepared for, gracefully executed suicide in Shakespeare displays magnificently (and appropriately) the most elaborate, carefully cultivated, consciously maintained, and yet at the same time most elusive sense of self—Cleopatra's. For all her “infinite variety,” her idle moods and ambiguous motives, her mixing of oblique and direct, her lapses from decorum and her insistence on due rank, her wild passions and her cool reserves, her openness and her opacity—all this, and more, apparent even in the final scene—still she seems whole. She is inconstant (always changing) without being essentially inconsistent, perhaps because what she embodies centrally is the power of continual change. And yet in the scene of her death, the main subject of chapter 5, below, she even manages to assert and make everyone accept her constancy. She is crowning forever not only her image but also a royal self of her own creation, albeit in the end a simpler one than she has shown us earlier.

5

The magic of Cleopatra in the last scene not only asserts the wholeness of her own life but also, like the magic of Isis tending to Osiris, patches up the fragments of Antony's. And we have seen how, in the case of Othello, a character asserts the wholeness of his life by recognizing a split in himself. Following these lines perhaps we can ask, without becoming inappropriately psychoanalytical, whether we find characters whose sense of self is in some way fragmented during the play and who then achieve a more integrated sense of identity in the final scenes, or, to put it another way, we can ask whether achievement of a whole sense of self is, like tragic self-assertion, a frequent formal element of last scenes.

Antony himself, for instance, when he has lost both the final battle and, apparently, the love of Cleopatra—when he has lost, that is, the centers of both his “Roman” and his “Egyptian” powers—says that his identity has become as shifting and indeterminate as a cloud:

That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water. …
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.

(IV.xiv.9-14)

We can see him, through the “suicide” of Cleopatra, his own suicide, and his last reunion with Cleopatra, trying to rebuild and reassert his “shape” as Antony. To a certain extent he succeeds, as we noted above, for he dies in Cleopatra's arms and manages to see himself as having been conquered by himself rather than by Caesar. And certainly his final acceptance of his life as it was, including the “miserable change now at [his] end” (IV.xv.51) and of Cleopatra as she is, including her last trick, does much to redeem the shabbiness of his suicide. Still, the suicide was shabby, and his contention that his valor, not Caesar's, has triumphed seems as good an example as any of what Eliot describes as cheering oneself up. And his “ascension” into Cleopatra's monument blends pathos and comedy in a way that stresses the variety of Antony's personality more than its unity. The scene of his death makes him a richer, more complex figure than the valiant Roman he claims to be in his final speech. It is left to Cleopatra's speeches about him after his death, both in IV.xv (especially “The crown o' th' earth doth melt,” etc. [63-68]) and in V.ii (especially her “dream” [76-100]), to produce a conventionally unified great man. Thus the process of Antony's reintegration can be said to continue somewhat ironically after his death, as a man of great (if not infinite) variety becomes, in the surviving imagination of Cleopatra and thus in the world's memory, a simple superhuman Emperor Antony.

Richard II is perhaps the clearest example of the fragmentation of identity in a tragic hero. Originally man and king were one. But as Richard began to neglect the legal and traditional responsibilities of the king (in effect allowing the man to use the king), he opened a split in this original identity which eventually allowed Bolingbroke to break the two completely apart. This split is the origin of Richard's obsession with the role of king; it's not that he is an actor at heart but that for the first time he must see “king” as a separate thing from man, and because they were originally one, he fears that ceasing to be king may mean ceasing to be anything at all. Yet being nothing might be preferable to this intermediate state of being in doubt. He finds oblivion attractive, as we noted earlier. Richard's obsession with the breakdown of his identity continues right through the final soliloquy and the dialogue with the groom. Only at the moment of his death, like the dying lion thrusting forth his paw (cf. V.i.29), does he clearly assert once more the unity of man and king:

                    Exton, thy fierce hand
Hath with the king's blood stained the king's own land.

(V.v.109-10)

Exton, says Richard, is killing more than a man. And though this assertion, like his physical resistance, may strike us as simply a matter of last-minute histrionics, the future proves him right.

Fragmentations of identity are not so simple in later tragic figures as they are in Richard. Lear, for instance, not only has the roles of man and king to reconcile, but also the role of father, in some ways his most difficult. Moreover, his sense of what it means to be a man is much more complex than Richard's. “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (I.iv.220), he asks early in the play, and his long search for an answer is not successful until IV.vii, when—reconciled with Cordelia—man, father, and king again become one.²⁰ But when Cordelia is killed, his identity is once more shattered and he ends still searching—not for an identity now, but for her life or a reason she is dead. By the end he has become the least ego-conscious of these dying heroes and makes no explicit assertion of self.

Hamlet's sense of identity is threatened in many ways. In the first half of the play he is progressively broken down by the world he experiences, and in Act III his behavior is so frantic that if it is not madness it might as well be. But also in Act III he seems to begin putting himself back together again. Each new experience from III.ii through V.i he brings into a new unity, a new sense of self. The process is painful; perhaps it involves learning to live with pain. But I think there is a great sense of relief, for us and for Hamlet, when he breaks into the funeral party with the cry, “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (V.i.244-45). The violence of this assertion is followed in V.ii by a calmer acceptance of himself and his role. His apology to Laertes (V.ii.215-33) seems sincere in its distinction between a former madness and the Hamlet who stands there now. Hamlet's selfishness is largely gone. He is “open and free”—to his own cost, in practical terms. He has no regrets, so long as his story is told. Hamlet maintains to the end a wholeness we can believe in. Of all the tragic figures, Hamlet probably achieves the most remarkable reestablishment of the sense of self, the most remarkable because he comes back by himself from a chaos of soul nearly as complete as Lear's, and unlike Lear he maintains his self-possession to the very end. He who had rejected so much in his world is now ready for anything, including death. Among the tragic figures who find their identities threatened, only Antony rivals Hamlet in his final acceptance of his life, and death; and Antony had not had to come so far to reach that acceptance.

Coriolanus's problem, because of the importance of his relation to his mother, is in some ways related to Hamlet's, but it is really much more limited. One might even state it as simply as this: is he man, superman, or boy? Unlike Richard, Hamlet, Antony, and Lear, Coriolanus seems barely conscious of his problem. Others are at fault; he almost never considers the possibility that he might be. There are some glimmers of recognition in V.iii, but they seem to have gone out by the final scene of all. He remains fragmented, the boy-man. In the absence of a really solid sense of self, his final self-assertion, quoted above, lacks the expressive balance of a Hamlet or an Othello or an Antony and lacks also the magical assurance of a Cleopatra. He lacks as well the persistent questing of a Lear, lacks even the single clear (if futile) assertion—physical and verbal—of a Richard, and, strangest of all, lacks even the plain physical defiance of a Macbeth. Yet perhaps this is not so strange after all. His last assertion is merely verbal, its force ironically undermined by his fragmented identity. Claiming to be a man, he is acting like a boy. Man to man Aufidius was no match for Coriolanus, and knew it, but he finally found a way to reach that point where Coriolanus was not solid, where Coriolanus could not effectively oppose him, where Coriolanus was not a man. The last irony is that Aufidius's victory is itself so unmanly and that his cue was Coriolanus's most manly act—giving in to his mother.

There is, I suppose, a kind of triumph in those characters whose deaths either explicitly or implicitly maintain their sense of self (whether solid or fragmented) in the face of opposition. This triumph is present in most of the tragic characters we have been discussing. But also in most the triumph is so like defeat that calling it a triumph is the same thing as saying that the tragic figures are simply creatures of greater possibilities than those who survive them, potentially finer human types, if you will, and that the tragic process, by exploring their possibilities, has revealed their superiority. But in at least three cases—Brutus, Antony, and Cleopatra—the characters themselves explicitly transform defeat into a triumph. All three are from the Roman world, and this attitude towards death is specifically identified by one of them—Cleopatra, the foreigner—as Roman:²¹

We'll bury [Antony]; and then, what's brave, what's
noble,
Let's do't after the high Roman fashion,
And make death proud to take us.

(IV.xv.86-88)

The triumph is partly a matter of dying “like oneself”:

I dare assure thee that no enemy
Shall ever take alive the noble Brutus.
The gods defend him from so great a shame!
When you do find him, or alive or dead,
He will be found like Brutus, like himself.

(JC V.iv.21-25)

Brutus, says the captured Lucilius here, will assert his sense of self triumphantly in life or death, and since capture would prevent such assertion, Brutus will die when capture is inevitable.²² In the event, Brutus sees his triumph as greater than his adversaries':

I shall have glory by this losing day
More than Octavius and Mark Antony
By this vile conquest shall attain unto.

(V.v.36-38)

Their triumph is vile, his is glorious, the difference presumably being that he is Brutus, “the noblest Roman of them all,” and as Strato points out, “Brutus only overcame himself, / And no man else hath honor by his death” (V.v.56-57). It is, so to speak, a “moral victory,” one whose ironies we have already discussed. In the later play, the later Antony, whose sense of self is wilder and more flamboyant than Brutus's, and who, after losing the final battle against Octavius, says that his identity has become as insubstantial as a cloud, nevertheless sees himself in death in the terms Brutus and Strato used for Brutus:

Not Caesar's valor hath o'erthrown Antony,
But Antony's hath triumphed on itself. …
                              [I] do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman. A Roman, by a Roman
Valiantly vanquished.

(AC IV.xv.14-15, 55-58)

As we noted above, since Antony killed himself on the basis of a lie, and didn't do it very neatly, his assertion here may seem a little forced, his death a little shabby; but Cleopatra turns his tragedy and her own into a grand triumph over Caesar, one we can almost accept without ironic reflections. She does this by making her death a work of art. She stages her suicide not only with grace of execution (so different from Antony's!) but also with a sense of dramatic control: Shakespeare shows Cleopatra achieving her triumph by an art analogous to his own.

6

Shakespeare’s presentation of Cleopatra as a stage-conscious artist creating her own life and manipulating the characters around her is the principal subject of chapter 5. For the moment, it is enough to note that he [Shakespeare] has made the action of V.ii essentially a comic intrigue in which Cleopatra attempts to circumvent the wishes of the antisexual Caesar in order to accomplish the union of herself and her lover, Antony. This scene has the kind of structure we find in so many comedies in which we see the young lovers outmaneuver the father figure who wishes to keep them apart. Enthroning herself in a regal tableau, Cleopatra succeeds in ritualizing a reunion and marriage with Antony. She even manages to make the marriage fruitful by turning the asp into a baby. She escapes into a bright new life free of the bonds of Caesar and the kind of life he represents. It is true that this comic victory is ironic, for Antony and Cleopatra are not only old, but also dead, and the world, the normal sphere of comic activity, is left for the young Caesar to bustle in. But at the same time the victory over Caesar, achieved by dying in rituals of their own creation, is what makes Antony and Cleopatra tragic figures. It was a greater thing to be Antony and Cleopatra than to be “the universal landlord,” and thus they triumph over Caesar in the tragic structure as well as the “comic” structure of the final scene.

The characters, Cleopatra above all, who assert their triumph in the face of the continuing society, the supposed winners, the new order, are claiming that they are really in control of events and are masters of their own fates. (Cleopatra may go so far toward remaking the world, the dramatic show, that perhaps only the fact that she does indeed die makes her story a tragedy.) But the claim of control is essentially made also by the tragic figures who without an explicit sense of triumph commit a suicide that is symbolically appropriate to their life, for they insist that they themselves are giving their life its final shape. And those too who ask that their story be told correctly are exercising a kind of control, for they are imposing a specified structure on the consciousness of posterity. All these figures, most of whom were accustomed to shaping in an important way the life of their times, are making in whatever way they can a last assertion of their will to control, their desire to give the world a shape that answers to their sense of themselves and the life they think they have lived. Sometimes the attempt to control is literally directed toward the surviving world, sometimes solely to themselves, sometimes to both at once. Of course the world can be put into various kinds of structure—political, moral, psychological, metaphysical, poetical, historical, even (as with Antony and Cleopatra) mythical—and the various tragic figures seek to impose a variety of shapes on life.

And yet, is it really an illusion, this sense of control? Is it the last illusion, rather than the last exercise of power over reality? Are any of them really better off than Macbeth, who refuses to compromise his instinctive sense of his own value by submitting either to Macduff or to Malcolm or to his own nihilism, who at the end continues to fight in opposition to the structure of his life as announced by the witches and as accepted for so long by himself, and who yet, for all his defiance, is obviously not in control? All the tragic figures, after all, end up dead, and they are defeated to the extent that the world didn't turn out the way they wanted it to, defeated by human enemies, or fate, or the nature of the world, or in fact by the very sense of self which seems to triumph. Are they all ironically more deluded than Lear, who has clearly lost all power to shape, and now, unconcerned with death as his own certain future, is left trying, and failing, to deal with Cordelia's, unable to accept her death or deny it, since to him it is an event that makes no sense?

And this leads to a further question: who or what is ultimately in control of the worlds of these plays?²³ Who shapes the tragic process the characters get involved in? Is it the individual human will, or is it a society which will not tolerate a certain kind of human greatness (and so destroys and survives that greatness), or is it something altogether beyond human control or comprehension—time, fate, chance, providence, the gods, God? Or is it the artist himself with his own incomprehensible mystery? (And to what extent are we stepping outside the work of art to ask the question in this last form?) These questions involve not only the relation of the tragic figures to the final order, but, perhaps more important, the characters' sense of their own powers to shape the events of the final scenes, which are, after all, the final scenes of their own lives. To speak this way of an analogy between the “scenes” of art and the “scenes” of life raises the question of the artist's participation in the final scenes and thus involves Shakespeare both as a shaper of his final scenes and as a possible analogue to his own characters. And the problems of art and the problems of life are explored together, for we find that in the greatest plays an extension of tragic form leads to an extension of human experience into more intense relation to something “outside.”

Again, Shakespeare gives us variety. Though the sense of something beyond man is rarely, if ever, completely absent, there are some plays which seem almost completely secular. There are others that have a structurally important religious dimension, a sense of control by something beyond. These are usually the plays where a good deal of metaphysical disorder occurs. One could arrange the plays on a rough secular-to-religious scale, beginning with Titus and Coriolanus, proceeding through Othello and Romeo and Juliet, and ending with Hamlet and King Lear.

With Hamlet and King Lear, we come to Shakespeare's most complex uses of superhuman controls—providence in Hamlet, “the gods” in King Lear. The new calmness and acceptance of life and death we see in Hamlet in Act V is associated with a belief in providence. In King Lear the gods are powerful, they are mysterious. Their relation to the human events they presumably preside over is obscure. They are not associated with the new order. The reestablishment of a human order at the end of this play is the most tentative in Shakespeare. Even in Troilus and Cressida the ironic new order—chaos—is firmly established. In King Lear, though we do return as usual from the tragic depths to the business of daily human existence, there seems to be nothing for that daily existence to do.

The new order usually brings us back to the secular, if we have been away. In any case, it brings us back to the ordinary. The tragic heroes have gone up against the ultimate. The greatest of them have gone up against the mystery, up to the barrier that separates human life and human understanding from whatever it may be that lies beyond. The new order stays, safely, well back from that barrier. In the comedies there is normally no such sense of retreat, but instead a promised advance into the future where life will go on not away from the mystery but in harmony with it, accepting it, whatever it is.

The tragedies do not decide what the relation is between human control and whatever lies beyond it. They present the problem as it presents itself in life: the question of the ultimate nature of what is beyond man's control is left open, as it must be if one is serious in asking it, as Shakespeare was. Any answer would be reductive. It would not do justice to the gods or to God. It would imply a comprehensive human intellect. It would deny the power of the irrational. And this is what the greatest of the tragedies are about—man's confrontation with things that don't make sense.

Cleopatra's form of this confrontation with things that don't make sense is to embrace them as a source of creative possibility, for in that lack of sense lies the chance of wonder. She “dreams,” for instance, of an Antony who never was and never could be except in the vision of a poet (see V.ii.76-92), an Antony, certainly, whom we never saw; and yet she boldly proves that her dream Antony could only be real:

But if there be nor ever were one such,
It's past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy, yet t' imagine
An Antony were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.

(V.ii.96-100)

Through Cleopatra's art the most wonderful becomes the most natural, the most real. But Cleopatra's art is really the art of her creator, and the process she performs with Antony is the basis of the dramatist's art, a process Shakespeare performs in each play, making his dreams seem real.

Since it's the nature of great art to be about, among other things, itself, the final scenes of the tragedies are about the ending of plays as well as about the ending of lives. We can most clearly see the poles of Shakespeare's exploration of this situation in the contrast between the endings of Antony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens, two plays which, besides being written near each other in Shakespeare's career, have, curiously enough, a common source in Plutarch's Life of Antony, where Antony, in one phase of his career, is compared to the man-shunning Timon.

Timon, we noted above, leaves the stage to die, in marked contrast to Cleopatra, who occupies the center of it triumphantly. In fact, Timon dies in marked contrast to all Shakespeare's other tragic figures, for he is the only one who dies offstage, the only one, that is, who leaves the world of the drama in order to die.²⁴ We may even see it the other way around: he dies by leaving the world of drama. In the absence of more specific information on his death, we may render the verdict of “self-inflicted death by rejection of the medium of his existence.”

Clearly Shakespeare uses this offstage death as one important way of characterizing Timon. He makes Timon uniquely anti-dramatic. Timon gives an appropriate shape to his death by refusing to let us see it, by refusing to be a character in a drama, by refusing, as it were, to go along with Shakespeare's art.²⁵ That art depends on an analogy (though not a simple one) between the world of man and the world of drama; but then if all the world's a stage and the stage is all the world, Timon, by dying offstage, expresses in an absolute way his hatred for the world by ceasing to be part of it, by leaving the stage where the human drama is played out. His rejection of drama is a way of expressing his rejection of life. “My long sickness / Of health and living now begins to mend,” says Timon, “And nothing brings me all things” (V.i.184-86). Other Shakespearean characters flirt in various ways with “nothingness,” but only Timon actually becomes nothing because only he so completely leaves the place which in drama contains everything and is every where—the stage.

In Timon's offstage death Shakespeare has, in a sense, violated the principles of his art, an art which involves placing dreams on the stage as if they were real. One might almost say that Timon's death doesn't happen, because what happens in the world of drama is what is done and said onstage, and the death of Timon is not even narrated to us by “offstage” witnesses. His grave and epitaph are found, and that is all.

The fact that Shakespeare built a play around a character who denies drama may suggest that Shakespeare himself was experiencing a kind of despair in the value of dramatic art. Or it may mean that he was simply experimenting with the extremes of tragic form. Certainly the play is an extreme of tragic form, and certainly Timon, if not the play, is an image of despair as he rejects the very power which created him.

Speculating on Shakespeare's motives is a risky, irresponsible, and amusing activity, and it is always a mistake to identify him with any of his characters. The characters and their attitudes must always be considered in the context of the play's structure as a whole. Thus in the case of Timon we see that Shakespeare carefully shows the limitations of Timon's “absolute” world view by confronting him in Act IV with Alcibiades, Apemantus, and Flavius, who do not fit his notion of “man,” and by setting his uncompromising rejection of Athens and man and life against the balanced, responsible, and conciliatory behavior of Alcibiades in Act V. Thus it may be that Timon's rejection of drama, in his offstage death, is simply another way, perhaps the ultimate way, of showing Timon's limitations. Just as Timon wishes for the perversion of nature's creative powers and for the self-destruction of human sexuality, both male and female, so he rejects the creative powers of the dramatic imagination. The structure of the play does not suggest that Shakespeare finally endorsed his creature's desires.

Nevertheless, the question of the value of his art must have been somewhere in Shakespeare's mind as he wrote Timon, for he puts into the play, in fact begins the play with, a direct image of himself—a poet who is writing about Timon.²⁶ And the “Fortune's wheel” poem this poet describes has the same simple view of life and of human nature, the same reductive two-part structure, that we find in the history of Timon's own world view. Moreover, the Poet's aim in writing is clearly to get money, and his reappearance at the beginning of Act V does less than nothing to reveal any limitations in Timon's view of man. It is tempting to see the Poet as Shakespeare's self-parody—a pompous man with no imagination and no sense of life's variety, a glib, flattering hypocrite, a man whose motive in writing is not artistic and creative but economic, a man, in short, for whom Timon's latter opinion might be adequate—Wm. Shaxper, the facile upstart crow with a finger in the Globe's every financial pie, borrowing feathers, never blotting a word, pleasing both royalty and rabble so he can get a coat of arms and buy that big house back in his hometown. The inaccuracy of the self-parody, like the inaccuracy of Timon's world view, is apparent in both the poetry and the structure of the play; still, Timon seems to consider the possibility that drama is a fraud.

Drama would be a fraud if the process on which it depends—the creation of lifelike illusions—turned out to be false to life. But this primal fact that drama is illusion needn't make it false to life. It would be essentially false to life only if life made absolute sense, as Timon wants it to do, and thinks it does, one way or the other. Ironically, Timon rejects the world partly because he has found that things (human nature, for instance) are not what they seem. He might have concluded from this, as Shakespeare seems generally to have done, that drama, with its traffic in illusions, is a highly appropriate way of dealing with life lived in a mysterious, various, constantly changing world. But Timon doesn't so conclude because he doesn't finally see that kind of world. Instead he would regard himself as “disillusioned.” Now he knows what the truth is, and drama must be rejected. Drama is essentially a fraud, rather than an illusion, only if one can be as positive about life as Timon is.

In contrast to Timon, Cleopatra dies by entirely embracing the world of drama. Instead of despising human creative powers, she celebrates them, in a sense creating her life as she lives it. Thus if Timon is an image of despair in dramatic art, Cleopatra is an image of faith, faith that for any moment, including death, the dramatic imagination can make a better life.²⁷ Cleopatra's primary concern in her final scene is neither to justify her behavior nor to ask anyone else to do so nor to offer a philosophical or moral summary of her opinions about the world. Instead, what she most wants to do as she dies is to put on a good show, for herself and for us. And the show does all the rest.

We come to the paradox that death can be a creative art for the tragic characters, and in this they imitate the tragic art of their creator, who in his own way is making death a creative art. We began this chapter by noting how often the tragic characters experience a desire for death. It is apparent now that this desire for death can take on some aspects of being an aesthetic impulse, that the ending of a life becomes the ending of a play.

This parallel of life and play, death and final scenes, appears even when the character himself is unconscious of his dramatic significance. If Cleopatra and Timon are opposite poles with respect to acceptance of the dramatic event, Cleopatra and Lear are poles with respect to consciousness of it. Where Shakespeare has made Cleopatra so very conscious of putting on a show, he has made Lear supremely unconscious. In contrast to Albany, who tries to make a neat conclusion to a play that isn't neat (especially with “All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deservings” [V.iii.303-5]), Lear persists as a dramatic character, occupying the center of the stage with his own interests and obsessions, continuing in his role, refusing to give up the play. For Albany as for Timon, everything was answered; for Lear, nothing. Albany's impulse to see moral balance in the world, whether it's there or not, has the “aesthetic” result of leading him to conclude the play prematurely. The impulse that keeps Lear going is the impulse to continue the process by which he has been attempting to come to terms with life, the process of dramatic confrontation with the elements of his world. In Act I Lear had attempted a more conscious kind of play in an attempt to assert his control over the emotional life of his daughters and subjects, but his play failed because one of his actresses wouldn't keep to her assigned role. In the acts that follow, drama becomes an unrehearsed dialogue with all that couldn't be contained in the terms of the Act I play, a dialogue through which he explores human nature, his own nature, the nature of family, of society, of the gods, of the macrocosmic forces of the storm, of death, trying to discover whether there is any moral purpose, any moral order to it all. As there has been no conclusion to his search (in contrast to Albany's), so there is no conclusion to his life, no conclusion to the play, but only a death, an end. Lear doesn't consciously give his death a shape, but since it becomes clear after his death that the survivors can't give a shape to the new world they inherit, the “shapelessness” of Lear's death is the only ending appropriate to the story. Lear's dramatic confrontation with a world that doesn't make sense is reflected in the lack of final order—of political “sense”—in the ending of the play.

We noted earlier that Shakespeare's tragic figures generally, in shaping their ends, their final scenes, are responding to a world they can no longer control. Whether they are conscious or unconscious of their shaping acts, whether their shaping takes the form of measured speeches about their lives or of symbolically appropriate suicides or of expressive rituals or simply of self-assertive acts, the characters are insisting, in a sense, on an artistic right, at times almost a creative right, over their own lives. This artistic control is particularly appropriate at those moments when the characters are confronting things in the world which don't make sense, because artistic control is control of illusion and, as I suggested above in talking about Timon, that very lack of strict sense that illusion implies can be the dramatist's means of doing justice to a world that doesn't make sense, to things that are finally beyond human control, like the inevitability of death. Art, the control of illusion, is a compensation for loss of control over “reality,” and not only compensation, of course, but also confrontation, exploration, and, ultimately, exploitation of the mysterious “real” world, exploitation because the sense of mystery is engaged on the side of the artist. Certainly, artistic control does nothing to make the world more sensible, whether we consider the elaborate form used by Cleopatra or the brief form used by Antony. It certainly makes no sense to say that one “will be / A bridegroom in [one's] death, and run into't / As to a lover's bed.” It seems absurd to say that a movement toward creation is in fact a movement toward death. Yet out of that absurdity is born the paradox that the act of death becomes a creative act, and in that paradox lies the secret of the tragic hero's value as an exemplary human figure facing part of the mystery.

And what can be true of the tragic hero is more constantly true of the tragic dramatist, Shakespeare himself. All his control of dramatic form and style serves finally not to make a world whose primary quality is to make sense, but to make dramatic worlds that exploit the paradoxical power of illusion to preserve, explore, and confront the complexities we experience in life. If the power of the dramatist is in some ways divine, if in some ways he is the one who controls the (dramatic) world absolutely, in other ways the power of the dramatist is a great image of human power extending itself fully in the face of a world that is mysterious and senseless or perhaps mysterious and wonderful but in any case beyond our control. In our experience of this world the moment of death is particularly crucial, since it's a moment when the mystery can no longer be put off, and for this reason the final scenes of the tragedies are of particular importance. “More are men's ends marked than their lives before,” and so too we have been “marking” the plays' ends. As the tragic figures assert themselves most fully in the scenes of their death, so Shakespeare's art is most fully extended in his final scenes, where he puts the power of human creation against what seems most destructive in the world.

And, as the world is not only mysterious but also various, mysterious partly because various, no single dramatic form can be definitive. Thus Shakespeare's variations and extensions of tragic form become a way of experiencing a strange, shape-changing world. Among these dramatic experiments, three plays seem to me to have dramatic shapes and, correspondingly, dramatic worlds that are more complex and strange than the rest—Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. They even more than the rest are unique and daring explorations of what can be accomplished by tragic art. I now turn, in the chapters that follow, to detailed examinations of the final scenes of these plays, attempting to respond to the particular music of each close, to the way Shakespeare has shaped each of the worlds.

Notes

1. For a different kind of discounting of “perception” as a defining characteristic of Shakespearean tragedy, see Maynard Mack, “The Jacobean Shakespeare,” in Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (1960; reprint ed., New York: Capricorn, 1967), pp. 37-38.

2. Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), p. 33. The passage is from Johnson's Preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765).

3. On Richard's forcing Bolingbroke to reveal his intent, see Brents Stirling, “‘Up, Cousin, Up; Your Heart Is Up, I Know,’” in Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The Interplay of Theme and Character (1956; reprint ed., New York: Gordian Press, 1966), pp. 26-39.

4. Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, 1932), pp. 107-20.

5. Ibid., pp. 110-11. It was Eliot, of course, who said (in 1919) that he had “never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer's objections to Othello” (see “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Selected Essays, p. 121). This suggests that he and Rymer are alike in the kind of moral demand they make on art, or on tragic characters. There is clearly a similarity in the demands they make on Othello, since they are apparently interested above all in what can (or should) be learned from the experience.

6. The Business of Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 39.

7. Even in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare has not suggested as much union as the situation would allow. The crueler version of the story found in Gounod's opera, for instance, keeps Romeo alive until Juliet wakes up, so that he realizes his mistake and can join Juliet for a final duet—a final expression, that is, of a harmonious union. But Shakespeare, with no operatic requirements and for once finding the original version cruel enough, followed his source.

8. Gardner, Business, p. 48.

9. This is perhaps another indication of Shakespeare's interest in moral problems rather than in moral lessons.

10. This follows Maecenas's serious use of the “mirror” figure in describing the effect on Caesar of Antony's fall (see V.i.34-35).

11. The contradictory statements may be more a sign of Shakespeare's indecision or carelessness than of Timon's “oppositeness,” his reflex to oppose whoever or whatever comes his way.

    Timon, for his part, seems to take a good deal of care over his epitaph. As early as Act IV he starts planning both the epitaph and his death:

    I am sick of this false world, and will love naught
    But even the mere necessities upon't.
    Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave.
    Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat
    Thy gravestone daily. Make thine epitaph,
    That death in me at others' lives may laugh.

    (IV.iii.372-77)

    Later he tells the senators who have come to seek his aid against Alcibiades that his final statement is about to be published:

    Why, I was writing of my epitaph.
    It will be seen to-morrow. My long sickness
    Of health and living now begins to mend,
    And nothing brings me all things. Go, live still;
    Be Alcibiades your plague, you his,
    And last so long enough!

    (V.i.183-88)

    Timon's opposition to all things human, which by now has grown almost mechanical, leads him into constant contradiction of motive. He wants to be left alone, but he clearly enjoys an opportunity for cursing men to their ears. He wants to be left alone in death as in life, and yet he wants men to read his epitaph:

    Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
    Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
    Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,
    Who once a day with his embossed froth
    The turbulent surge shall cover. Thither come,
    And let my gravestone be your oracle.

    (V.i.212-17)

    When the oracular epitaph finally appears, it takes three contradictory forms. First is the inscription, apparently in the vernacular, read by the “Soldier … seeking Timon for Alcibiades”:

    “Timon is dead, who hath outstretched his span.
    Some beast read this; there does not live a man.”

    (V.iii.3-4)

    But there are also the two couplets which must be carried to a scholar (Alcibiades!) for translation:

    “Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft;
    Seek not my name. A plague consume you wicked caitiffs left!
    Here lie I, Timon, who alive all living men did hate.
    Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass, and stay not here thy gait.”

    (V.iv.70-73)

    Does Timon want his name known or not? The easiest explanation is that Shakespeare found two epitaphs in North's Plutarch, one attributed to Timon and the other to Callimachus, that he wrote down both, intending to choose one later, and that either the text we have is based on an early draft or Shakespeare never finished the play at all. (See, e.g., the Arden note on the passage by H. J. Oliver, ed., Timon of Athens [London: Methuen, 1959], pp. 139-40.) However, the epitaph as it stands—contradictory—is consistent enough with Timon's attitudes and behavior in the last two acts, and it may be that, whatever the basis of the Folio text, Shakespeare intended to keep both versions as forming a fitting epitaph to the man we have seen. Timon wants to be left alone, he wants to be forgotten; yet he wants men to feel his hatred beyond his death, he wants to be remembered for it. Timon would not be the only Shakespearean tragic hero to die in self-contradiction; in their various ways, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth do the same.

12. For the life-sex-death metaphors, see M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957; reprint ed., London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 58, 72.

13. Contrast Lear, whose manner of death is, as it were, chosen for him by death itself.

14. But cf. lines 21-22, where before learning of Cleopatra's “death” Antony is ready to die for “Roman” reasons: “Nay, weep not, gentle Eros, there is left us / Ourselves to end ourselves.”

15. Again, note the difference between the moment of Antony's suicide and the moment of his death. And Cleopatra, in her suicide, speaks not of the past or of her future reputation in history but of what she is accomplishing at that very moment—the union with Antony and the nursing of the child and the fooling of Caesar.

16. For an analysis of this speech in a different context, see chapter 5 in The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, University Press of Kentucky, 1978.

17. I also find it interesting that Richard II does not ritualize his death. He reasserts his kingship for the last time; that is all. Of course, since he is murdered, he hasn't even the leisure Juliet has to select a happy metaphor. Nevertheless, I miss a final ritual in the man who earlier had so often experienced them, used them, or, more and more, as his power waned, created them—the ritual of his baptism (IV.i.255-57) and coronation (passim), the rituals of court arbitration and chivalric trial (I.i and I.iii), the ceremonious return to his country (III.ii.6-26), the ceremonies due to kingship which in Act III are either not there when they should be (iii.72-76) or there when they seem a mockery (ii.171-77 and iii.190-95), a ritual of exchange to turn himself from king to beggar to corpse (III.iii.143-59), a ritual of dis-coronation to mark officially his fall from office (IV.i.203-21). But perhaps the absence of ritual at his death is ironic and ultimately triumphant for the man who had invested so great a psychic stake in the power of ritual and who had come to grief because he had acted as if the bare ritual, divorced from the realities of daily political responsibility, could keep him king in spite of all. Now, at the end, it is after all Bolingbroke, as later it will be his son Henry V, who must face the problems of ruling a country where now ritual is ritual and reality is power.

18. On Brutus's use of ritual see Brents Stirling, “‘Or Else Were This a Savage Spectacle,’” in Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy, pp. 40-54.

19. Revenge, like suicide, is an activity that invites ritualization, and it is a prominent motive in the final scenes of a surprising number of the tragedies. But in only two of them, I think, do we feel that personal revenge is central in giving the final scenes their particular shape: Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. The common form in the final scenes of these two plays is the explosion of a social affair, a ceremonious meeting. In Titus Andronicus the affair is a banquet, in Hamlet a fencing match. In Titus the revenger (Titus) creates the form himself (having Tamora eat her own children, sacrificing Lavinia) but loses control of it and is killed in a flurry of less ritualized revenges. In Hamlet the form is created by others (one of them, Laertes, himself a revenger) and taken over in the middle by the principal revenger, though he has already received a fatal wound. The way in which the social affair explodes in Hamlet is unique in Shakespeare, though it appears elsewhere in Elizabethan revenge tragedies (in The Spanish Tragedy and Women Beware Women, for instance). It involves the contrived transformation of what appeared to be a “fiction” into a fact. A fencing match—murder in jest—is transformed by Laertes and the King into a deadly swordfight. Civilized play gives way to the old reality behind it. Since among Shakespeare’s tragedies only Hamlet has this form, I will discuss it at length in the chapter of that play.

20. Kingship is taken from him in V.iii, but he finds that part of his identity to be the least important. I don't suggest that looking for an identity is all Lear is doing for four acts, or even that it is the most important thing.

21. It is perhaps also the attitude identified by Eliot as “this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not.” Macbeth, of course, simply refers to “Roman fool[s],” who “die / On [their] own sword[s]” (V.viii.1-2).

22. Early in Act V, when Cassius asks him what he will do if they lose, Brutus seems to share Macbeth's opinion of Roman fools; he will not kill himself, as Cato did, “For fear of what might fall” (V.i.104). But when Cassius then asks him if he is willing to be led a captive through Rome, Brutus seems to contradict himself:

    No, Cassius, no. Think not, thou noble Roman,
    That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome.
    He bears too great a mind.

    (110-12)

    He, too, will do “what's brave, what's noble, … after the high Roman fashion,” and he, of all people, should. If Brutus is not contradicting himself here, he is apparently making the distinction between “might” and “will” which, ironically, he failed to make earlier. He killed Caesar “for fear of what might fall,” but won't kill himself in the same circumstances; he will only kill himself when a shameful defeat and capture become a certainty.

23. For an extended study of “ultimate” things in Shakespeare, especially in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest, see Robert H. West, Shakespeare & the Outer Mystery (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968).

24. I have seen productions of Macbeth in which the hero is killed offstage, but the Folio text says clearly that Macbeth is “slain” by Macduff in front of the audience. Troilus and Pandarus do go off the stage, but the play ends before they can die, which makes their situation the opposite of Timon's—their medium deserts them, instead of the other way around!

25. Of course, I don't entirely want to make Timon sound like a character who wandered backward in time out of some play by Pirandello and found a place for himself in the early seventeenth century. But there is certainly a stage-consciousness in Shakespearean drama and in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama generally that disappeared in the movement toward the “well-made” play and resurfaced in modern drama, above all in Pirandello. Shakespeare makes various of his characters conscious of their “dramatic” life in various ways. Cleopatra's way will be an important subject in chapter 5, below. For a discussion of Shakespearean tragedy in terms of its stage-consciousness, with a lot of well-deserved space given to Hamlet but none to Cleopatra, see Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), pp. 2-11, 26-29, 40-72.

26. Literally, “one … of Lord Timon's frame” (I.i.69), but the intent is clear. As in As You Like It II.vii.70-87, Shakespeare is parodying the satirist's refusal to be specific and name names.

27. What I'm saying is not affected by the relative dates of Timon (1605-1608) and Antony and Cleopatra (1606-1607), which, as I noted earlier, come out of the same source in Plutarch. One may consider Timon nearer to King Lear on the basis of style and theme or nearer to Pericles on the basis of its use of an inadequate poet within the play, a poet who claims to tell the whole story but fails to do its complexities justice. (On the inadequacy of Gower as a narrator, see Kenneth J. Semon, “Pericles: An Order beyond Reason,” Essays in Literature 1 [1974]: 17-27.)