Brooke Nicholas - Shakespeares early tragedies

Routledge Library Editions

SHAKESPEARES
EARLY TRAGEDIES

SHAKESPEARE

Routledge Library Editions Shakespeare

TRAGEDIES
In 8 Volumes

SHAKESPEARES
EARLY TRAGEDIES

NICHOLAS BROOKE

First published in 1968

Reprinted in 2005 by
Routledge
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Transferred to Digital Printing 2008

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1968 Nicholas Brooke

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Shakespeares Early Tragedies

ISBN 0-415-35320-3

ISBN 0-415-33086-6 (set)

Miniset: Tragedies

Series: Routledge Library Editions Shakespeare

Shakespeares
Early Tragedies

Nicholas Brooke

METHUEN & CO LTD

First published 1968
by Methuen and Co Ltd
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4
1968 Nicholas Brooke
Printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd.,
Bungay, Suffolk

SBN 416 19340 4

Distributed in the U.S.A. by
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for

Clifford and Gabriele Leech

Some parts of the first three essays have appeared in print before, and I am grateful to the editors and publishers of Critical Quarterly, and of Gemini Books 2: Shakespeare: The Tragedies, ed. C. Leech, for permission to reprint them here.

Quotations and line references are, for the plays discussed, to the new Arden Shakespeare where available, that is for Titus Andronicus, ed. J. C. Maxwell, Richard II, ed. P. Ure, and Julius Caesar, ed. T. S. Dorsch: I am indebted to their editors for their commentaries and introductions as well as for their texts. For Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet I have used the Collins Tudor Shakespeare, ed. P. Alexander, and found particular help for all the plays in the New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. J. Dover Wilson. References to other Shakespeare plays are always to Alexanders edition.

I owe a great debt, too, to innumerable other critics and scholars who have written on Shakespeare: it would be impossible to record this in detail, and I have used footnotes only sparingly for specific points; the books and essays which I have found most interesting are listed in the selective bibliography, though it should be said that some of the more recent items were published after I had drafted my own discussion of the plays.

Most of these essays originated as lectures in the University of Durham, given at the suggestion of Professor Clifford Leech: it is a pleasure to recall the encouragement, and the criticism, that made working with him there such a memorable experience. I am grateful too to students in Durham and in the University of East Anglia with whom I have discussed these plays.

Finally, I must acknowledge the patience of my family during the years in which, on and off, I have been pre-occupied with this book, and especially my wife and our younger son, Thomas, who have lately laboured prodigiously to compile the index.

July, 1968

It has for some time seemed an established fact that Shakespeares greatest plays were his tragedies, and that the period of his greatest tragedies began with Hamlet and ended with Macbeth. This has been so generally agreed in the past hundred years that it has come to seem an irrefutable judgement; perhaps it is in fact so, I certainly do not intend to challenge it in this book. But it did not always seem so transparently clear, or at least did not once seem to rest on so absolute a distinction; it was not in fact given final identity before Bradleys Shakespearean Tragedy appeared in 1904. German criticism and German philosophy of the nineteenth century, the work especially of Hegel and Nietzsche, assured the preeminence of tragedy, and especially of Greek tragedy; it was Bradleys achievement to transfer this allegiance decisively to Shakespeare. In his modification of Hegels theories to fit the English case, he established strong grounds for believing that tragedy is not just a dramatic genre, but, in its true form, a distinctive and peculiarly fine experience.

It is, I think, rather curious how easily this discrimination has been assimilated: it seems to have become possible for every schoolchild to distinguish true tragedy from any other play which ends with the death of the hero. Some may have doubts whether Antony and Cleopatra ought not to be admitted to the distinguished group, though Bradley determined with particular care that it should not. But no one, so far as I know, has proposed that any tragedy before Hamlet should be regarded in the same light. The earlier plays are often treated as merely that: exercises prior to the great achievement that was to follow. Yet I said that this, which has become so clear, was not always so: Whately compared Richard III and Macbeth in the eighteenth century, and saw the superiority of the later play; but he did it, a hundred and fifty years after Shakespeares death, with an air of discovery; and he certainly did not determine that because Macbeth was a superior play, Richard III was therefore an uninteresting one. And in comedy, no such distinction has yet been established: no doubt there are marks of maturity in As You Like It that are lacking in Loves Labours Lost; it would not be difficult to point them out; but they are not such as to ensure general agreement that the later play is in an altogether different class. But then, no one has had an intuition of a definable comic experience by which one may know true comedy from any other kind.

The theatre itself does not seem to have been more discriminating in tragedy than in comedy. Hamlet is altogether Shakespeares most successful play; but after that it is not clear that the later plays come off better than the earlier, and it is in fact quite clear that