The Strangeness of Tragedy, and: Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (review)

Is our understanding of a Shakespearean play enhanced by an exploration of its dramatic genre? Shakespeareans are likely to respond gingerly. For many, a Shakespearean “comedy” seems to be nothing more complex than a play that ends in marriage, whereas a “tragedy” is an unhappy plot in which the conflict unleashes lethal catastrophic consequences. The gems in a Shakespearean play are to be located within the contours of the dialogues, the potent images and the psychologically insightful ways in which they issue out of a character’s emotional state, the rhythm and musicality of the language, the believable and illuminating development of a character, or what characters discover in themselves as they talk or change. Values of this nature have little to do with the play’s organizing plot structure, be it comic, tragic, tragicomic, or some other generic concoction. Yet dismissing the study of unifying structures in defense of some interpretative particularism is never wholly convincing. As one defender of plot’s relevance has aptly put it, “It is precisely the recognition of the common genus which throws into relief and makes significant the variation of the particular.”¹ Accordingly, the question to ask is not whether genre inquiries are enlightening as such, but how specific suggestions regarding the tragic or the comic illuminate complex moments within Shakespeare’s plays in unpredictable ways.

Two recent inquiries into tragedy—one focused exclusively on Shakespeare, the other broader in scope—reawaken this question. For Paul Hammond, tragedy is a process by which protagonists are alienated from their world, their home, and their language. They are estranged from themselves and from the audience. They experience themselves translated into an entity that they can barely understand. Throughout this process, such characters discover an unfamiliar dimension in their own experience, one that they believed they knew, and the audience responds to this process of self-estrangement. Tragedy thereby brings out the (usually suppressed) friction existing between what we are and our linguistic, familial, or national homes. We are made aware that “a foreignness haunts the familiar” (5). Hammond traces the “linguistic strangeness” of tragic texts, alerting us to the unassimilatable nature of such language. As he excellently puts it, such quirky language is all too often domesticated and normalized by editors and well-meaning translators (11). Hammond’s most winning example (out of the three chapters his book devotes to Shakespeare) relates to Othello and his motley language already prior to the violent turn of events in the play.

For Paul A. Kottman—whose book is exclusively about Shakespeare—tragedy (or, more precisely, “tragic conditions”) relates to a radical collapse of social ties, a dissipation of the glue that bonds us together. Tragic representation involves the shattering discovery that the social links that render our lives meaningful are “fully dissolvable” (4). Tragic conditions are the recognition that one has nothing to inherit and nothing to bequeath. Dislodged from its social fabric, the character’s predicament awakens the audience to the fickleness of that which holds them together. Like Hammond, Kottman focuses on estrangement, in which the familiar world recedes and something new emerges. But where Hammond perceives the tragic as a movement into a homelessness that was always somehow there, Kottman locates it at the discovery that a home and all that stands for it are nothing more than a contingent arrangement that can give way under one’s trusting feet.

Once one learns to negotiate the regrettably convoluted and riddling nature of Kottman’s prose, his focus on bequeathal emerges as a genuine insight. Defamiliarizing the process of inheritance shows how central it is to culture and human bonds in general. Transferring property, name, and/or heritage to one’s offspring joins nature and culture together, since the natural facts of begetting children and dying are conditions for the preservation and dissemination of power, status, and heritage...