This ground-breaking book reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision that drives Shakespeare's tragedies, tracing its unbroken development from its beginnings in the Henry VI plays and Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, right through to his last, Coriolanus. The four full-length studies at the heart of the book focus in depth on Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, but with the same unmistakably Shakespearean tragic vision at its core. Through compelling new readings of the plays, grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan shows how Shakespeare dramatizes the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits.
Preface
PART I
1 The Birth of Shakespearean Tragedy: 2 & 3 Henry VI
The Quondam King
The Wild Morisco
The Upstart Crow
The Devil's Butcher
PART II
2 Titus Andronicus: A Sympathy of Woe
Prototypes and Precursors
A Wilderness of Tigers
This Fearful Slumber
3 Romeo and Juliet: Kissing by the Book
Strange Love Grown Bold
The Prison-House of Language
Empowering the Audience
4 Julius Caesar: The Common Good
An Icy Anatomy
Scorning the Base Degrees
The Foremost Man of All the World
PART III
5 Hamlet: A Kind of Fighting
The Stamp of One Defect
Seeing Doubles
That Within Which Passes Show
Things Rank and Gross in Nature
The Whips and Scorns of Time
The Strong Confluence of Contending Forces
A King of Infinite Space
The Prophetic Soul of the Wide World
6 Othello: Thereby Hangs a Tail
Expectation in Preference to Surprise
Sinking Below Shakespeare
True Colours
The Green-Eyed Monster
Who Hath Done This Deed?
The Tragedy of the Handkerchief
If Wives Do Fall
Motiveless Malignity and the Curse of Service
What You Know, You Know
A Pageant to Keep Us in False Gaze
7 King Lear: Shakespeare's Leviathan
A Play Fit for a King
Echoes and Anticipations (i)
Echoes and Anticipations (ii)
A Better Where to Find
The Whoreson and the Plague of Custom
The Fool and the King
The Art of Known and Feeling Sorrows
The King and the Beggar
So Distribution Should Undo Excess
A Whole Dead World Galloping Over the Living Earth
8 Macbeth: The Habit of Another Nature
Embracing the Butcher
Supernatural Soliciting
Terrestrial Tragedy
The Language of Complicity
Vaster Powers Without: Mirroring Macbeth
So Much More the Man
Dispossession and Disavowal
Pity, Like a Naked New-Born Babe
Blood Will Have Blood
Ere Humane Stature Purged the Gentle Weal
PART IV9 Antony and Cleopatra: Making Defect Perfection
Tragedy Travestied
The Nobleness of Life
Past the Size of Dreaming: Utopian Realism
A Lass Unparalleled
10 Coriolanus: A World Elsewhere
Antecedents and Affinities
An Inventory to Particularize Their Abundance
To Unbuild the City and to Lay All Flat
A Kind of Nothing
Works Cited
Index
