This, at any rate, is the faith in the strength of which I venture, with merely personal misgivings, on the path of analytic interpretation.  And so, before coming to the first of the four tragedies, I propose to discuss some preliminary matters which concern them all.  Though each is individual through and through, they have, in a sense, one and the same substance; for in all of them Shakespeare represents the tragic aspect of life, the tragic fact.  They have, again, up to a certain point, a common form or structure.  This substance and this structure, which would be found to distinguish them, for example, from Greek tragedies, may, to diminish repetition, be considered once for all; and in considering them we shall also be able to observe characteristic differences among the four plays.  And to this may be added the little that it seems necessary to premise on the position of these dramas in Shakespeare’s literary career.

Much that is said on our main preliminary subjects will naturally hold good, within certain limits, of other dramas of Shakespeare beside Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.  But it will often apply to these other works only in part, and to some of them more fully than to others. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is a pure tragedy, but it is an early work, and in some respects an immature one. Richard III. and Richard II., Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus are tragic histories or historical tragedies, in which Shakespeare acknowledged in practice a certain obligation to follow his authority, even when that authority offered him an undramatic material.  Probably he himself would have met some criticisms to which these plays are open by appealing to their historical character, and by denying that such works are to be judged by the standard of pure tragedy.  In any case, most of these plays, perhaps all, do show, as a matter of fact, considerable deviations from that standard; and, therefore, what is said of the pure tragedies must be applied to them with qualifications which I shall often take for granted without mention.  There remain Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens.  The former I shall leave out of account, because, even if Shakespeare wrote the whole of it, he did so before he had either a style of his own or any characteristic tragic conception. Timon stands on a different footing.  Parts of it are unquestionably Shakespeare’s, and they will be referred to in one of the later lectures.  But much of the writing is evidently not his, and as it seems probable that the conception and construction of the whole tragedy should also be attributed to some other writer, I shall omit this work too from our preliminary discussions.

LECTURE I

THE SUBSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY