At the height of his powers, Shakespeare revealed a tragic vision that comprehended the totality of possibilities for good and evil as nearly as the human imagination ever has. His heroes are the vehicles of psychological, societal, and cosmic forces that tend to ennoble and glorify humanity or infect it and destroy it. The logic of tragedy that possessed him demanded an insistence upon the latter. Initially, his heroes make free choices and are free time after time to turn back, but they move toward their doom as relentlessly as did Oedipus. The total tragic statement, however, is not limited to the fate of the hero. He is but the centre of an action that takes place in a context involving many other characters, each contributing a point of view, a set of values or antivalues to the complex dialectic of the play. In Macbeth’s demon-ridden Scotland, where weird things happen to men and horses turn cannibal, there is the virtuous Malcolm, and society survives. Hamlet had the trustworthy friend Horatio, and, for all the bloodletting, what was “rotten” was purged. In the tragedies, most notably Lear, the Aeschylean notion of “knowledge through suffering” is powerfully dramatized; it is most obvious in the hero, but it is also shared by the society of which he is the focal figure. The flaw in the hero may be a moral failing or, sometimes, an excess of virtue; the flaw in society may be the rottenness of the Danish court in Hamlet or the corruption of the Roman world in Antony and Cleopatra; the flaw or fault or dislocation may be in the very universe itself, as dramatized by Lear’s raving at the heavens or the ghosts that walk the plays or the witches that prophesy. All these faults, Shakespeare seems to be saying, are inevitabilities of the human condition. But they do not spell rejection, nihilism, or despair. The hero may die, but, in the words of the novelist E.M. Forster to describe the redeeming power of tragedy, “he has given us life.”

Such is the precarious balance a tragedian must maintain: the cold, clear vision that sees the evil but is not maddened by it, a sense of the good that is equally clear but refuses the blandishments of optimism or sentimentalism. Few have ever sustained the balance for long. Aeschylus tended to slide off to the right, Euripides to the left, and even Sophocles had his hero transfigured at Colonus. Marlowe’s early death should perhaps spare him the criticism his first plays warrant. Shakespeare’s last two tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, are close to the edge of a valueless void. The atmosphere of Macbeth is murky with evil; the action moves with almost melodramatic speed from horror to horror. The forces for good rally at last, but Macbeth himself steadily deteriorates into the most nihilistic of all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, saved in nothing except the sense of a great nature, like Medea, gone wrong. Antony and Cleopatra, in its ambiguities and irony, has been considered close to the Euripidean line of bitterness and detachment. Shakespeare himself soon modulated into another mood in his last plays, Cymbeline (c. 1608–10), The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611). Each is based on a situation that could have been developed into major tragedy had Shakespeare followed out its logic as he had done with earlier plays. For whatever reason, however, he chose not to. The great tragic questions are not pressed. The Tempest, especially, for all Prospero’s charm and magnanimity, gives a sense of brooding melancholy over the ineradicable evil in humankind, a patient but sad acquiescence. All of these plays end in varying degrees of harmony and reconciliation. Shakespeare willed it so.

Decline in 17th-century England

From Shakespeare’s tragedies to the closing of the theatres in England by the Puritans in 1642, the quality of tragedy is steadily worse, if the best of the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies are taken as a standard. Among the leading dramatists of the period—John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Cyril Tourneur, and John Ford—there were some excellent craftsmen and brilliant poets. Though each of them has a rightful place in the history of English drama, tragedy suffered a transmutation in their hands.

The Jacobean dramatists—those who flourished in England during the reign of James I—failed to transcend the negative tendencies they inherited from Elizabethan tragedy: a sense of defeat, a mood of spiritual despair implicit in Marlowe’s tragic thought; in the nihilistic broodings of some of Shakespeare’s characters in their worst moods—Hamlet, Gloucester in Lear, Macbeth; in the metaphoric implication of the theme of insanity, of man pressed beyond the limit of endurance, that runs through many of these tragedies; most importantly, perhaps, in the moral confusion (“fair is foul and foul is fair”) that threatens to unbalance even the staunchest of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. This sinister tendency came to a climax about 1605 and was in part a consequence of the anxiety surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the accession of James I. Despite their negative tendencies, the Elizabethans, in general, had affirmed life and celebrated it; Shakespeare’s moral balance, throughout even his darkest plays, remained firm. The Jacobeans, on the other hand, were possessed by death. They became superb analysts of moral confusion and of the darkened vision of humanity at cross purposes, preying upon itself; of lust, hate, and intrigue engulfing what is left of beauty, love, and integrity. There is little that is redemptive or that suggests, as had Aeschylus, that evil might be resolved by the enlightenment gained from suffering. As in the tragedies of Euripides, the protagonist’s margin of freedom grows ever smaller. “You are the deed’s creature,” cries a murderer to his unwitting lady accomplice in Middleton’s Changeling (1622), and a prisoner of her deed she remains. Many of the plays maintained a pose of ironic, detached reportage, without the sense of sympathetic involvement that the greatest tragedians have conveyed from the beginning.

Some of the qualities of the highest tragedians have been claimed for John Webster. One critic points to his search for a moral order as a link to Shakespeare and sees in his moral vision a basis for renewal. Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (c. 1612–13) has been interpreted as a final triumph of life over death. Overwhelmed by final unleashed terror, the Duchess affirms the essential dignity of man. Despite such vestiges of greatness, however, the trend of tragedy was downward. High moral sensitivity and steady conviction are required to resist the temptation to resolve the intolerable tensions of tragedy into either the comfort of optimism or the relaxed apathy of despair. Periods of the creation of high tragedy are therefore few and short-lived. The demands on artist and audience alike are very great. Forms wear out, and public taste seems destined to go through inevitable cycles of health and disease. What is to one generation powerful and persuasive rhetoric becomes bombast and bathos to the next. The inevitable materials of tragedy—violence, madness, hate, and lust—soon lose their symbolic role and become perverted to the uses of melodrama and sensationalism, mixed, for relief, with the broadest comedy or farce.

These corruptions had gone too far when John Milton, 29 years after the closing of the theatres, attempted to bring back the true spirit and tone of tragedy, which he called “the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems.” His Samson Agonistes (1671), however, is magnificent “closet tragedy”—drama more suitable for reading than for popular performance. Modeled on the Prometheus, it recalls Aeschylus’s tragedy both in its form, in which the immobilized hero receives a sequence of visitors, and in its theme, in which there is a resurgence of the hero’s spirit under stress. With Restoration comedy in full swing, however, and with the “heroic play” (an overly moralized version of tragedy) about to reach its crowning achievement in John Dryden’s All for Love only seven years later (published 1678), Samson Agonistes was an anachronism.