The Genre of Tragedy. From an intertextual perspective. The native medieval drama offered no direct model for tragedy

Even though Shakespeare occasionally drew a tragic plot from fiction, the premise that tragedies are based on the givens of history or established legend and comedies on fictional events the writer can mould as he wishes has its own internal logic. The chain of cause and consequence is more usual in lived experience than magical transformation. Actual lives, no matter how rich in power and achievement, always end in the final defeat of death, and tragedies, whether they end in death or not (Shakespeare's always do), have the same fated quality of what has already happened and cannot be changed or evaded. In its unerring movement towards that inevitable conclusion, tragedy enacts the cadential rhythm of every human existence, even while it protests against that inevitable end in its countermovement of expanding heroic self-realization.

formulas on events of great magnitude and persons of exalted estate accords with life thus felt from the inside, the unique self and its never-to-be-repeated life. (Shakespeare's Othello, Antony, and Titus Andronicus are indispensable military commanders, Julius Caesar and the men who kill him are central to the leadership of Rome; even Romeo and Juliet are the focal points of a social division that threatens to destroy a whole city.) But life may also be apprehended, by different minds or by the same minds in different circumstances, in a more social way: as something common and ongoing, the community weathering upheavals and vicissitudes by finding new ways to adapt and regroup. The clever devices that untie comic knots enact this real sense of continuity and new opportunity even while they remould hard facts into the image of our wish. Comedy's more ordinary characters, who evade death and disgrace and move on to marry and procreate, assert against the personal orientation of tragedy a sense of life as an endless stream in which we participate but are not the whole story.

From an intertextual perspective, Elizabethan tragedy grows, like any other form, out of roots in earlier literature. Classical drama provided one source, although the work of the great Greek tragedians in Shakespeare's time was known, if at all, mainly to the learned in the occasional Latin translation. Euripides was more admired than Aeschylus or Sophocles, and also more available in Latin versions; individual plays of his have been claimed as models for the rhythm of Titus Andronicus, 'suffering to an intolerable pitch, followed by the relief of aggressive action' (see Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare, 1977, p. 98) and for the pervasive disillusionment of Troilus and Cressida with its self-divided characters and unstable values (see Margaret J. Arnold, '"Monsters in Love's Train": Euripides and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida', Comparative Drama 18, 1984, pp. 38-53.) Better known and more revered than any Greek was the Roman tragedian Seneca. The models his plays provided for high passionate rhetoric, structured by repetition and opposition, probably assisted Renaissance writers, including Shakespeare, on their way to mature tragic verse. On the other hand, Seneca may have been credited with too much influence in other areas: the comic dramatist Terence is the more likely model for five-act structure, and the complaining ghost was already omnipresent in the narrative tragedies generally labelled de casibus after Boccaccio's archetypal collection detailing the falls of the mighty, De casibus virorum illustrium. Boccaccio's work was translated at one remove by Lydgate in his fifteenth-century Falls of Princes and later imitated in a popular compilation, The Mirror for Magistrates, which was first issued in 1574 and republished several times, with substantial additions, through 1610. In the Mirror, figures from English and Roman history narrate in the first person their greatness and fall, providing numerous models for individual tragedies--Richard II, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, Locrine, Julius Caesar, and so on--and cumulatively a sense of the instability of worldly greatness. That sense also pervades Seneca's dramas and, from a different perspective, the equally well-known narratives of mutability in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Another cumulative effect of the Mirror narratives has potential relevance for the sense of blurred responsibility in most of Shakespeare's tragedies, where personal failings and external circumstances operate in a mysterious conjunction to bring down the hero. The Mirror collection as a whole creates a similar ambiguity, with some figures attributing their falls to personal flaws and crimes while others blame fortune, the instability of this fallen world.

The native medieval drama offered no direct model for tragedy, but certain features of it point towards the tragic: especially the Passion of Christ in the mystery plays, a single life and death freighted with significance; and in the morality plays the deployment of personified virtues and vices to explore internal conflict. After the Reformation, a new theological emphasis on reprobation made tragic shaping a possibility in Protestant moralities such as Enough is as Good as a Feast (1560s) and The Conflict of Conscience (1570s). At the same time a few early attempts at tragedy began appearing. Some were classical in orientation, such as Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc (1562) and Gascoigne's Jocaste (1566), performed at the universities and Inns of Court, and some more popular, such as Horestes (1567) and Cambises (1569/70), which mingled high and low estates and leavened the tragic events with a large dose of comedy. These plays, although variously wooden, flat, and incoherent, nevertheless gesture towards a serious secular drama. Norman Rabkin has found promise of the more golden future in the very confusions that make Gorboduc and Cambises individually unsatisfactory as works of art: the ambivalences that cloud any clear moral message in them thus open the way to tragic complexities as some neat causality inside a single moral system could not ('Stumbling Toward Tragedy', Shakespeare's 'Rough Magic': Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppйlia Kahn, 1985, pp. 28-49).

In any case, the golden future was not long in coming. The 1580s saw the beginnings of true tragic shape and style in two successful dramas of the commercial stage: The Spanish Tragedy (?1587) and Tamburlaine (1587-8). In the first, by Thomas Kyd, the central premise of revenge is complicated by questions about the relation of such individual justice to social and divine law. The Spanish Tragedy also keeps blurring the line between theatricality and life, so that events presented as plays become all too real, and courses of action apparently individually willed are shown to be a fated script. The second, by Christopher Marlowe, opened up new horizons with its soaring verse and grand heroic vision. Both plays eschew the reductive moralizing that had short-circuited any tragic effect in earlier proto-tragic poems and dramas, Tamburlaine instead celebrating heroic virtщ and The Spanish Tragedy underlining its ironies of concept and perspective. The next notable developer of tragic possibility was Shakespeare himself, in the 1590s and the early 1600s.

No single formula informs Shakespeare's tragedies. The decisive tragic act may be variously placed, as early as the first scene in the case of King Lear, which then traces out in the rest of the action the ramifications of Lear's giving up power and dividing the kingdom, or as late as the last scene in the case of Othello, where the emphasis is rather on the complicated internal and external forces that push the Moor to murder the wife he loves. In the tragedies of the 1590s Shakespeare's focus shifts from heroic suffering in Titus Andronicus to social and generational tension in Romeo and Juliet to the clash between personal integrity and political imperative in Julius Caesar. When he later returns to some of these areas of tragic conflict--the dialectic of personal and political in Coriolanus, generational dynamics and monumental suffering in King Lear--the result in each case is a different tragic vision. If they are linked by any distinctive feature, it is the structuring of events to mark the limits of the hero's power by moving him from his sphere of established mastery into a situation demanding another, perhaps diametrically opposed, kind of effectiveness. Othello and Coriolanus must leave the straightforward hostilities of war for the covert rivalries of peace-time society; Brutus and Hamlet, the amplitude of uncommitted speculation for a realm of action that calls for decisive deeds. More voluntarily, Macbeth goes from an honourable subordination to a royal power he cannot wield righteously, and Lear in the other direction, from supreme authority to dependence.

In 1598, Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia noted the pre-eminence 'among the Latins' of Plautus for comedy and Seneca for tragedy, and praised Shakespeare as 'among the English the most excellent in both kinds'. That Meres lists along with Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet as examples of Shakespeare's tragedies four plays later classed in the Folio as histories--not only the tragically shaped Richard II and Richard III but King John and Henry IV as well--suggests the instability of generic labelling at the time and the fluid mingling of kinds. Meres may also have had some difficulty in getting his total of Shakespearian tragedies up to six in order to balance the six comedies he has just listed: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and the problematic Love's Labour's Won, which refers either to a lost play or to one now known under another name. While Shakespeare's great tragic period, the decade from 1599 to 1607 or 1608, was still to come, Meres had no trouble finding successful comedies to list. Indeed, if modern chronologies are correct, he could have added others: The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing. After something like ten years writing for the public stage, Shakespeare's credentials in comedy were well established.