5. SHAKESPEARE: TRAGEDIAS

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Terminamos nuestro repaso a las tragedias de Shakespeare con unas notas sobre King Lear.

 

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KING LEAR: Nivel avanzado

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El 25-26 N haremos un breve repaso de las tragedias de Shakespeare, centrándonos más en nuestra principal lectura, Macbeth. 

Shakespeare. Macbeth. Folger Theatre / Two River Theater Company, co-directed by Teller and Aaron Posner. YouTube (FolgerLibrary) 25 March 2020.

 

Hay muchas otras versiones de Macbeth: las clásicas de la BBC,  la más reciente de Justin Kurzel.... (ver bibliografía http://bit.ly/abibliog ). No sé si habréis visto la de Rupert Goold (2010) que ha estado disponible en nuestra web estos días, pero ya está descolgada. Aquí hay algunas más: 

- Macbeth for Grampian TV (1997)

- Macbeth on stage (Bob Jones University, 2020) 

Hay más siguiendo nuestra etiqueta "Macbeth".

 

Una representación en español:

"La tragedia de Macbeth." (Estudio 1). Shakespeare's drama filmed for TV. With Francisco Piquer, José María Escuer, Margarita Esteban, Carola F. Gómez, Julia Lorente, Vicente Vega, Julio Núñez, José Sepúlveda, Irene Gutiérrez Caba, Tomás Blanco, Julio Navarro, Eduardo Moreno, Víctor Fuentes, Ricardo Merino, Rosario G. Ortega, Pilar Bienert, Félix Dafauce, Ramón Reparaz, José Luis Lespe. TVE, 1966. 

         YouTube (TEATRO) 12 April 2018.*

https://youtu.be/C-gUMuDT7_A

         2019

Hay otra película más clásica aún, la de Orson Welles, de tono expresionista, bastante recomendable. Y pueden verse otras por ahí, con Sean Connery, o con Rupert Goold, bastante peores.

 

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 An audio on Macbeth (BBC In Our Time).

 


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Más crítica shakespeariana—aquí está el libro de A. C. Bradley Shakespearean Tragedy, que comentamos algo en clase—quizá el más influyente libro jamás escrito sobre Shakespeare.  Northrop Frye, a cuya Anatomy of Criticism también me referí, también fue un influyente crítico de Shakespeare en otras obras. Y hoy en día Stephen Greenblatt, Harold Bloom...

Un comentario adicional sobre las "fuerzas enfrentadas" en las tragedias, según Bradley: "Tragedia y dinámica de fuerzas"

Y sobre la teoría aristotélica de la tragedia hay algunas lecciones en mi sitio web Hypercritica.

En la sección sobre crítica clásica, claro.

 
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Verdi's opera  Macbeth: The Sleepwalking scene

  

NIVEL AVANZADO: Julius Caesar, 

—one of Shakespeare's 'Roman plays' or historical tragedies.

—unas notas sobre Othello.

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Un audio de la BBC (In Our Time) sobre Hamlet:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jqtfs

 

 

 

 

Sobre algunas tragedias de Shakespeare, varias de ellas representadas en Zaragoza, también he escrito alguna reseña:

- Hamlet marica - Otelo siempre en Alepo - Korol' Lir


Macbeth website at MIT:
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/full.html




 Marjorie Garber,  a lecture on Macbeth:

NIVEL AVANZADO: Paul Cantor, 3 lectures on Macbeth.

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THEORIES OF TRAGEDY

Aristotle's theory of tragedy in the Poetics (see Introduction): importance of action, of human defects and limitations, of misfortune and wrong choices. Tensions added by kinship (clashing roles).

Catharsis: pity and fear

Rationalism and lack of religious interest in Aristotle's Poetics. Origin of anthropological theories of tragedy.


Myth criticism:

Nietzsche: Apollonian vs. Dionysiac

Gilbert Murray and the seasonal cycle.
Frye's cycle of mythoi (mythos of autumn).

Girard: the tragic protagonist as pharmakos or scapegoat.  Exemplary suffering which rebuilds the community through purgation of a flaw. Regeneration and acceptance of death.

(Cf. the noble death).

 

Northrop Frye's archetypal theory of tragedy.

 

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Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy

The substance of tragedy: 
 Historical or legendary subjects.
Tragedy as the story of a person (or 2)

Suffering in contrast to prosperity: as the product of characteristic choices.

Protagonist face obstacles of their own making: emphasis on responsibility and tragic choice.


Characteristic deeds: Abnormality, the supernatural, etc. are marginal.

Chance is prominent (linked to unforeseeability, failure of plans and multiple consequences of actions): Fate only in that sense

Actions leading to conflict: both external and internal conflicts mirror each other.

Ruling passions or obsessions (hamartia) leading to wrong choices. Villain-heroes.

No divine order: a human world which involves the destruction of both good and evil.

Structure of conflict: stability  - evil impulse disturbs order - Reaction involving destruction of both evil and good involved with it.

E.g. Macbeth.

See also Bradley on the rhythm of Shakespeare plays: alternation of scenes of tension and calm. 

 

 

 

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NIVEL AVANZADO:

 

An early tragedy, and a bit of "Bad Shakespeare"—which can be very good indeed.

Julie Taymor's film version of Titus Andronicus.



 

 

The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy

 Notes from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

 

From the Third Essay —ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM (THEORY OF MYTHS):

The mythos of spring: Comedy

The mythos of summer: Romance

... the Mythos of winter: Irony and satire

The mythos of autumn: Tragedy

(206): "Without tragedy, all literary fiction might be plausibly explained as expression of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of repugnance: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested quality in literary experience." 'Realism' as emancipation from dream. Tragedy is not confined to drama or to disastrous endings. The source of tragic effect is not in the mood but in the mythos (Aristotle). Comedy is based on social groups; tragedy focuses on the individual, between the divine and the all too human. 

(207): "The tragic hero is very great as compared with us, but there is something else, something on the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is small." The hero is our mediator, wrapped in the mystery of that communion, isolated. What is beyond? (208) "Tragedy seems to lead up to an epiphany of law, of that which is and must be." Fate, etc.—a law superior to the gods themselves (cf. the Father's will, vs. Christ's). 

Revenge tragedy has a simple, binary structure (as opposed to threefold comedy). Revenge may come from another world. The law of nature comprises it as well. Diké, justice; the righhting of the balance = nemesis. Nemesis happens impersonally, unaffected by the moral quality of the human motivation involved. 
- Fate is not external to the hero all the time: normally only after the tragic process has been set going. Admixture of heroism necessary (unlike in irony). 
 - Also, the moral interpretation of tragedy is reductive.  Hamartia is not equivalent to sin. Hybris is frequent as the cause of the hero's downfall. But the morally intelligible process is only a part; catharsis cannot be reduced to a moral interpretation.  At the core: is the innocent sufferer a tragic figure? Tradedy is not concerned with it; it eludes the antitheses good / evil and moral responsibility / arbitrary fate. An archetypal tragic situation in Paradise Lost: man is "sufficient to have stood, though free to fall". Otherwise, we would be in irony or in romance. Proairesis or moral choice as a use of freedom to lose freedom; to come under the consequences of one's act and fate. 

(212): "And just as comedy often sets up an arbitrary law and then organizes the action to break or evade it, so tragedy presents the reverse theme of narrowing a representatively free life into a process of causation". At the end, the hero recognizes the determined shape of the life he has created for himself.

Aristotle's hamartia is a condition of being, not a cause of becoming. At a point, the audience can see both what might have been and what will be. Nemesis is involved with time, whose movement is fatal to the tragic hero as it is beneficial to the comic hero. In irony, unlike tragedy, there is no sense of contact with a timeless world.

Each theory of tragedy is based on a particular tragedy: Aristotle's on Oedipus the King,  Hegel's on Antigone, here Paradise Lost. There are analogies between tragedy and sacrificial ritual; pity and fear are crucial, too, a sense of rightness and wrongness.

(214): "just as the literary critic finds Freud most suggestive for the theory of comedy and Jung for the theory of romance, so for the theory of tragedy we naturally look for the psychology of the will to power as expounded in Adler and Nietzsche." Dionisiac dreams  will impinge upon an Apollonian sense of external order. The vision of the death of the herodraws survivers into a new unity. The hidden world and its remoteness has become visible. Tragedy is a part of quest-myth, a prelude to comedy. It is virtually impossible to make a comedy end somberly; it is not 'natural'. Comic actions in tragedies are contained in underplots, not in the main plot.

Characterization:

The source of the nemesis is an eiron. The withdrawn eiron of comeddy is here a god or a ghost or an invisible force. The "vice" is here a soothsayer or prophet, or a Machivellian villain, who is also an architectus or projection of the author's will. 

The tragic hero is an alazon (unlike in comedy). He is self-deceived by hybris, and often holds a tyrannic or unlawful power: the rightful owner is often a victim. 

Parental figures have the same ambivalence as in other forms. 

The bomolochoi turn here into suppliants, destituted females... They are pathetic, nor tragic. There are terrible consequences if they are rejected, they arouse pity and fear. 

The agroikos here is an outspoken plain dealer, a chorus character. (218) "In comedy a society forms around the hero: in tragedy the chorus, however faithful, usually represents the society from which the hero is gradually isolated." There is an embryonic germ of comedy in tragedy, just as the refusal of festivity is tragic in comedy. 

Love and society are not integrated in tragedy: love is reduced to passion and social activity to duty: cf. Antigone. 

The phases of tragedy go from heroic to ironic. The first three correspond to teh first three of romance; the last three correspond to the last three phases of irony.

1) The hero is given the greatest dignity  in contrast to others: the stag pulled down by wolves. Often a calumniated mother.

2) The tragedy of innocence in the sense of inexperience. Often characters survive, adjusted to adult situations.

3) An emphasis on the completeness of the hero's achievement. The paradox of the downfall which is a triumph, or a triumph with an impending tragic resolution.

4) The typical fall of the hero through hamartia (the tragic flaw).

5) In this phase the heroic element decreases, the ironic one increases; the characters are seen from further away and in a smaller perspective. The ironic perspective is attained by putting characters in a state of lower freedom than the audience (e.g. cultural inferiority). Tragedies dealing with existential projections of fatalism belong here. They deal with metaphysical or theological questions rather than social and moral ones.

6) A world of shock and horror, with central images of sparagmos (dismemberment), mutilation, cannibalism and torture. The hero is too agonized to achieve a heroic status; often a villainous hero. Demonic epiphanies, glimpses of undisplaced demonic vision. The chief symbols are teh prison, the madhouse, the torture chamber. The victim experiences horror at being watched by public exposure.
 

What is HEROIC DRAMA?

NIVEL AVANZADO: Paul Cantor on 'Othello'

NIVEL AVANZADO: Macbeth

Julius Caesar (BBC) - NIVEL AVANZADO

The Tragic Law

From McAlindon's English Renaissance Tragedy (38-39):

In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe shows all the sensitivity to the theological and symbolic implications of this legend that one would expect from a former student of divinity. Having denied God's love and grace, Faustus becomes enchanted with stellar gods and mythological fables and commits himself to a demon whose name, Lucifer, is that of a Babylonian tyrant in 'Jerome's Bible' (Isa.14:12; Doctor Faustus, I.i.38); he is easily persuaded that 'Marriage is but a ceremonial toy' (II.i.147), and finally seals his damnation by embracing the succubine Helen. But Marlowe's great achievement was to have seized on the legend's core of universal truth and tragic irony. What his play communicates with terrible force is that there can be no such thing as autonomy of action in the real world: every act either confirms an existing bond or creates a new one; it has binding consequences and is a deed in two senses of the world. Thus the tragic design of Doctor Faustus turns on the appalling peripeteia whereby the rejection of a bond whose grant of limited freedom (the freedom of the sons of God) has begun to seem intolerably constricting and servile leads not to liberty and power but to a condition of claustrophobic and degrading servitude: the hero becomes the deed's creature, a prisoner of what he himself has willed.

This tragic law is operative in plays as diverse as Macbeth, Othello, The White Devil, and The Changeling, its presence signalled by the symbolism of the demonic pact or marriage, or by the Marlovian pun on 'deed' and 'will'. Even in the pagan context of King Lear its presence is keenly felt at the outset. The 'hideous rashness' (I.i.150) which thrusts Lear into 'the tyrannous night' (III.iv.147) involves a ritual abjuring of love, grace, and benison (I.i.265), a brutal attempt to prevent a marriage of true minds, and an act of fatal submission to the will of two women who seem to fetch their nature from 'the mysteries of Hecat and the night' (l. 109).

Nevertheless the paradigm of ordered and disordered relationships that deeply affects Renaissance tragedy as a whole is the cosmological and not the theological one. The bonds undone in Lear are not—or not primarily—those between men and gods. As in The Spanish Tragedy, they are familial, matrimonial, and national bonds, as well as the bonds of service and hospitality; and, as in Kyd's play, their universal model is the union of contrary elements in a just and fruitful relationship where individuality and mutuality are simultaneously acknowledged. Here the sign of catastrophe is the sudden eruption of a fiery, primordial hatred which would consume its opposite or consign it to the void: 'No contraries hold more antipathy / Than I and such a knave'; 'as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this for ever' (II.ii.82-3; I.i.114-15). Here too the experience of Hell is the discovery that a human bond of incomparable value has been violently and irrevocably broken: 'Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never' (V.iii.306-7).

Tragedia y dinámica de fuerzas

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Thomas Kyd - NIVEL AVANZADO

From McAlindon, English Renaissance Tragedy:

"When Kyd tied love and justice, marriage and law, into a firm thematic knot, and linked them to the universal principle of harmonious contrariety, he showed his contemporaries and successors how to combine in a richly significant pattern the elements of romance and intrigue attractive to a popular audience with those matters of state traditionally thought proper to tragedy. As a result of his design, the interaction of socio-political and sexual disorder is a constant feature of Renaissance tragedy" (39).

In Kyd's play we have the original and archetypal model for an important episode in many Renaissance tragedies, the Treacherous Entertainment, the most characteristic scene of renaissance tragedy:

"This scene may coincide with the major point of change near the centre of the action, but as a rule it forms the catastrophe. It may consist simply of a banquet or a game; more often it is a play or masque performed in conjunction with a marriage. But, whatever its position or form, it is always  a ritual affirmation of love and union which turns out to be a monstrous negation of everything it affirms" (41). 

Confusion of opposites is its guiding principle. Set in contrast or analogy to other ritual scenes, "a basic constructional formula on which the dramatists are heavily dependent" (41): "rite gone wrong" pun is ubiquitious. Rite is posited as as stable image of society, vs. play as the new and disturbing notion of the nature of life.

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"VII. The Spanish Tragedy then, as Shakespeare perceived, is all of a piece, but complex and richly suggestive. In construction, characterisation, symbolism and style, it figures what happens to a peninsula (a binary geopolitical unit), to a nation, and to a noble individual when the untrustworthy 'second self' breaks free from the bond that controls 'difference'. One kind of difference (conflict) multiplies and prevails, the other (distinction, identity) is obliterated. A society publicly committed to love, peace, and celebration is secretly at war with itself, racked with private griefs and hatreds. Civility and cruelty, justice and barbarism, patience and revenge, reason and madness, ripeness and sterility, play and deadly earnest all become undistinguishable. Orphic man inflames the Furies and demons, domesticates Babel and finally destroys language altogether. The dramatic poet who is the tragic hero's alter ego recognised that a play which adequately presents this process must risk being 'hardly understood' by some and deemed 'a mere confusion' by others. Audaciously, he took the risk, leaving it to the judicious to ask, like Theseus confronted with the artisans' comical tragedy, and no doubt like the first courtly audience of A Midsummer Night's Dream, 'How shall we find the concord of this discord?' Neither in prologue nor in epilogue, however, does he help us to find what we are looking for; all his clues—'Ariadne's twines'—are in the artifact itself." (McAlindon 80-81).

Nought but shows—Music for a while

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A lecture on 'The Spanish Tragedy' (Thomas Kyd)

Doctor Faustus (2017) | RHUL's Student Workshop

Aristotle's Poetics

Aristotle's Poetics (S. H. Butcher's translation). Online at Wikisource:


https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poetics_translated_by_S._H._Butcher/1



Aquí tenemos también la Poética de Aristóteles: el texto fundamental de la teoría teatral de Occidente, y también de la poética literaria, y de la narratología. En la traducción de S. H. Butcher, en Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm#2H_4_0001

Prestaremos atención ante todo a la primera mitad. Traedlo a clase, e id leyendo tanto este texto como la selección de Goffman.

Nuestro primer texto dramático para poder ir adelantando lecturas será Marlowe. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Aquí en red en Project Gutenberg:
    http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/779
    2012




- Del curso sobre teatro de Missouri, lección 9: The Play (y alusiones a la Poética de Aristóteles)





Aristotle's Poetics (BBC In Our Time, audio): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xw210

 


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