“Reconciliation” in Tragedy: Shakespeare and Sophocles

HRECONCILIATION"- IN TRAGEDY SHAKESPEARE AND SOPHOCLES ELMER EDGAR STOLL M ANY of the later critics of Shakespeare have sought in thejinale of his tragedies for signs of a · reconciliation with life, or a justification of the ways of God to men so far as they are in question in the story. Some have received vague impressions to the effect that what befalls the good and unoffending does not matter in comparison with what they are, and that the evil in the tragedy is only negative and barren; others, . less numerous, who have not received such impressions, have, in their disappo1n tment, contrasted Shakespeare with the Greeks. ·The·Greeks, they say, both present a probl~m and provide a solution. I will not again1 consider the position first-named. As some few have noted before me, the great critics Dowden and Bradley, who take it, have, though with taste and tact, offended against the principles of both history and Crlt1Cl$m. It is a sort of Hegelianism that discovers this "feeling of reconciliation" which tragedy provides 11 in virtue of its vision of eternal justice;,'2 it i~ a sort of monism or pantheism that determines this doctrine of good and evil. In Shakespeare, as Croce rightly observes ) good and evil are uas light opposed to darkness.u But the critics' fundamental error is not so much in attributing to Shakespeare ideas modern and alien as in attributing ideas of any sort. Every work of art-despite the . authors, prefaces or "programmes," footnotes and appendices , keys or interpretations] nowadays needed and provided-every work of art stands alone and 1s self1See my Art anti Artifice in Shakupeare, 1933, pp. 163-6. 2W. M. Dixon, Tragedy, 1924, p. 163. 11 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY contained. u A play is signifieant in itself/' as Professor Frye declares, "or not at all!' It is the other position that now interests me: Shakespeare and Sophocles, -as I take it) though the Englishman in all probability knew nothing of the Atheni.an, are in this matter of a reconciliation nearly at one. It is only lEschylus who puts the problem and endeavours piously to solve it. It is-only'.!Eschylus ·who makes the hero, such as Orestes, both right and wrong, and carries the human conflict up before the celestial tribunal, or (like Euripides, though in a different spirit) brings the gods down before the terrestrial. The undertaking is l)ecessary. For it is only lEschylus who fearlessly and relentlessly traces the causes of human calamity back to the sufferer's own or his ancestors' transgressions, whether voluntary or not, following the long and devious course of a curse, and, in the prqcess) representing the murderer also as an avenger and making a victim of him in turn. Thus the .foremost of tragic poets produces great situations, as in the case of Agamemnon and his :filial avenge.L-the king ~ntering his palace with the guilt of lphigeneia's blood and the curse of the Thyestean banquet upon his head, as well as the envy of the gods for his presuming to tread upon the purple tapestry, and Orestes pursued by the Furies for avenging his father upon his mother. But he has need of a reconciliation, or adjustment: he has to bring some moral order i-nto the primeval mythical confusion upon which he has entered. . It is otherwise with Sophocles, who resembles Shake-_ speare. He keeps the scene on earth, and the deities in the ba-ckground·. What interests him is story and character , not an idea behind them, and emotions, not the moral or immoral forces which provoke or punish them. Life for him is not a problem but a mystery, not so much_ 12 "RECONCILIATION" IN TRAGEDY a discipline or retribution as a calamitous but heroic experience, the tragedy which presents it being a tale of a great misfortune, not of a misdeed, cast in a compact and stimulating dramatic mould; and for the most part his heroes and heroines suffer and perish without any curse upon them or even a ·tragic fault within. Morals for him are the accepted morals of his day, insufficient and inadequate to explain God...