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SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY - Coggle Diagram
SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY
PLEASURE ASPECTS OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDIES
the restoration of social order, reunification and reconciliation
the reunions and reconciliations achieved by the protagonists themselves
understanding or ‘recognition’: a spiritual process from blindness to vision
awareness that there is no univocal answer
the final restoration of the protagonist’s nobility
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN CLASSICAL AND RENAISSANCE TRAGEDY
a steep fall from prosperity to misery and death
great change with conflict between tragic character and superior power
Intense exploration of suffering and evil of an excepcional individual
FEATURES OF SENECAN TRAGEDY
highly rhetorical plays
protagonists
sense of selfhood
monologues and soliloquies
hyperbolize feelings calling on to the ‘sympathetic universe’
conscious wrongdoers
humanly uncontrollable passions
cursed by evils rooted in the past
a companion figure
warns the protagonist against the dangers of succumbing to passion
correspondence between disorder in the human and the natural world
ARISTOTLE´S CHARACTERISATION OF TRAGEDY
a catharsis of pity and fear
OTHER VIEWS
G. W. Hegel
the existence of a just and divine world order
Nietzsche
conflict and reconciliation of opposites
Apollo
reason, control, and art
Dionysus
passionate destructive energy, orgiastic abandon, and the self-renewing force of life itself
A. C. Bradley
conflict within the hero
a man divided against himself
Twentieth-century commentators
attraction and repulsion
pity draws us sympathetically to the protagonist
fear dissociation and judgement
THE RENAISSANCE AS AN AGE OF CONFLICT AND CHANGE
The splitting of Christianity : Catholics and Protestants.
Interconnected with the Reformation was the decline of feudalism, the rise of authoritarian monarchy, and the waning power of the old aristocracy
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SHAKESPEAREAN AND CLASSICAL TRAGEDIES
conjoined the sublime and the homely and made its devils and villains either ludicrous fools or mocking comedians
inclusion of comic elements and plebeian characters
the comic is always on the verge of the tragic, and vice versa
violent passion onstage instead of confining them to narrative report in the classical manner.
SHAKESPEARE AND THE DESTRUCTION OF HUMAN GREATNESS.
what constitutes true nobility
the notion of ‘honour’
nobility as a class
educated aristocracy (individualist self-assertion)
chivalric knight and the soldier (warlike valour)
the complete nobleman
nobility is equated with potential barbarism, a denaturing of the self
excels in the arts of both war and peace
skilful with sword and tongue
unites in his character the qualities we designate as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’
SUFFERING AND DISTRESS IN SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDIES
dramatic intensity
eloquence
protagonist cries out in anguish to human or divine witnesses of his or her misery
fortune
a mysterious supernatural being with a cruelly unpredictable personality
fate
ominous occurrences which provoke fearful speculation
initiates a continuing process of inquiry and interpretation
nature
signifies God’s ordering of a world rendered imperfect by the Fall
time
nature in its temporal dimension: day and night, spring and autumn, summer and winter
Time’s justice: retributive or corrective, restorative, a force for renewal