Since Tennessee Williams has had a persistent interest in the idea of tragedy, there is good reason for looking at his serious plays in the light of a theory of tragedy. In this essay the term tragedy is used for a drama that is centrally concerned with a split personality, not a pathological split, such as Williams sometimes dramatizes, but a representative division between the different imperatives and impulses that human beings feel. A tragic character is strong enough so that an impulse that drives him can be destructive rather than simply annoying, and so that some kind of reordering is imaginable for him. Since reordering implies consciousness of what one is and has done, a tragic character needs the kind of intelligence that will make him more than a blind automaton in action and feeling. (p. 770)

In his earlier plays Williams tends to focus his attention on...