Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith

3: TRAGIC GRACE

It easeth some, though none it ever cured, To think their dolor others have endured. The Rape of Lucrece, lines 1581–82 Oh, I have suffered With those that I saw suffer! The Tempest, 1.2.5–6 In comparison to comedy, the genre that Shakespeare most favored, his efforts at tragedy were fitful. Though he wrote comedies steadily from the beginning to the end of his career, ultimately inscribing almost as many as histories and tragedies combined, after an early effort at tragedy, Titus Andronicus (1589–1592), he did not return to this genre for at least two years. His second effort was Romeo and Juliet (1594–1596), after which he again set tragedy aside for at least three years before writing Hamlet (1599–1601).1 The difference between Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet is remarkable, and the difference between Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet is more remarkable still. It is as if Shakespeare desisted from writing tragedy twice in the 1590s in order to be able to write it with the consummate skill and insight that he eventually achieved. Practice did not make perfect in this case; patience did. Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus were all likely written in the next seven years after Hamlet—at the rate of almost one per year. All those plays are not equally accomplished tragedies, as everyone recognizes, but even the least of them bears comparison with the best of what Shakespeare’s contemporaries achieved in the same genre. Yet those seven years cannot accurately be called a “tragic period” for Shakespeare, because he likely wrote All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Pericles during the same years. 65 3 TRAGIC GRACE 66 John D. Cox What Shakespeare learned about tragedy in the 1590s arguably has something to do with his increasing skill in writing comedy.2 From the beginning, as we have seen, his comedies imagine human nature in light of Christian destiny—fallen, and therefore indelibly frail; redeemable, and therefore capable of improving in self-knowledge and in sociable relationships; but not perfectible this side of the eschaton, and therefore incapable, even at its best, of acquiring complete self-knowledge or of achieving unreservedly satisfying or permanent relationships. His comedies become increasingly skillful and sophisticated in imagining human beings with these assumptions in mind, and I would argue that his tragedies eventually developed from continuing reflection on the same assumptions and on what they mean. Shakespearean comedy and tragedy share a common vision of human destiny, but they imagine it, so to speak, in different phases.3 Whereas comedy emphasizes growing self-awareness, resolution, reconciliation, and renewal, with wedding as its typical culminating symbol, Shakespearean tragedy emphasizes misunderstanding, treachery, loss, disastrous accident, and failure, with death as its culminating symbol. Both emphases reflect what actually happens in the continuum of human experience;4 both, as Shakespeare imagines them, are properly viewed in light of the Last Things, thus emphasizing the fragility of goodness;5 yet both happen alike to the good and the evil. Indeed, in Shakespearean tragedy, the tragic effect is usually proportionate to the goodness of those who suffer, and the point is not what they do—or fail to do—to bring on their suffering but the enigma of suffering itself. TITUS ANDRONICUS The difference comedy makes is especially striking in the contrast between Shakespeare’s first effort in tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and his second , Romeo and Juliet. Written under the strong influence of Seneca, Titus attempts to produce in English the same effects that Shakespeare knew well in Latin.6 Though the play frequently anticipates later tragedies (Hamlet’s ambiguous madness in an effort to avenge a loved one’s death, Iago’s gleeful treachery, Lear’s overbearing assertion of seniority’s privilege , Lady Macbeth’s manly-hearted ambition, Coriolanus’ insistence on unswerving patrician duty and his turning on Rome), the emphasis is Tragic Grace 67 clearly elsewhere.7 The point of Titus’s terrible suffering is not to explore questions of human destiny but to provide a means for heightening his character through rhetorical dilation, in the manner of classical declamation.8 The opening scene displays a series of peremptory decisions on Titus’s part that enable successive displays of magnificently expressed resolve, though they are puzzling and even pointless if one tries to understand them morally or politically apart from stoic...