Shakespeare's Tragedies: Violation and Identity (review)

Alexander Leggatt, long a go-to guy for Shakespeare's comedies, has now turned his notes to tragic, in a collection of readings of seven Shakespeare tragedies. The book is unusual in that it is not invested in advancing a contextual register or even a particular theoretical lens. Rather, it offers a series of medium-close readings driven by the way in which his chosen subset of plays resonate with each other thematically, figuratively, and characterologically: "Violated identity, violated space, the damage that comes with interpretation and even with relationship itself, the double nature of characters and of the acts they commit—these will be the concerns of the discussion that follows" (7). It is a discussion free, sometimes refreshingly so, of consideration for the wellsprings of these predominant concerns. As such, this book is either a throwback to an earlier critical mode or perhaps a harbinger of things to come.

Leggatt's focus is on the way in which tragedy is propelled by acts of violation and its reverberations upon human identity formation. His ur-text for the tragedies is Titus Andronicus, a play whose critical and performative fortunes have risen sharply of late. For Leggatt, all roads lead from Rome, in particular from the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, and Rome's disconcerting effects on the attempts to interpret and identify her in the wake of the atrocities. He reads the rape and the subsequent fragmentation of Lavinia's identity as the template for all the other plays he treats (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth) and suggests these events also serve as a template for some plays he doesn't. His readings proceed primarily by way of noting linguistic, structural, and characterological echoes of this play and by an attention to Shakespeare's repeated stress on the damage done by characters' interpretations of one another. The boundary crossings of Titus (of bodies, cities, and nations) reverberate throughout the tragic canon, as does the damage done to daughters. Lavinia haunts Shakespeare's tragedies: "Shakespeare, so long as he wrote tragedy, could never get Lavinia out of his mind, could never heal those wounds or silence that silence" (209). In Romeo, "the initial gentleness of the lovers . . . turned violent through their involvement in the world, an involvement signaled by their names. . . . the children are buried, like Lavinia with Titus, in an ancestral tomb" (54). "Hamlet's father returns from the grave, as Lavinia returns from the woods, in a 'questionable shape' (I.iv.43)" (55). "The question asked of Lavinia and the Ghost—who or what is this?—is a question that in Troilus and Cressida is provoked by the play itself" (84). In Othello, "as the assault on Lavinia is also a Gothic assault on Rome, the attack on Brabantio's house seems linked with the political action" (114). "In the first scene of King Lear, Cordelia endures a cruel twist on Lavinia's fate: it is her father who tries to annihilate her" (145). In Macbeth, "the murder, like the rape of Lavinia, takes place offstage" (177). To paraphrase Lady Macbeth, who would have thought the girl to have had so much blood in her?

In many ways this book is a pleasure to read: Leggatt has a keen ear, in a kind of compare-and-contrast way, for how the plays echo and rewrite and "[ricochet] against" (205) each other; he puts new spins on old saws and offers many elegant insights elegantly formulated, and the account moves smoothly. There are plenty of good observations: with the murder of Hamlet Sr. it is "as though a fabric has been torn, the notion of interment has become meaningless, and from this point it seems impossible for anyone to get a decent burial in Elsinore" (57); in Troilus, "even familiar identities need to be constantly checked" (86); with Desdemona's breathing, "we think back to the quick breathing of love Cassio imagined, and beyond this play...