The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare

 We speak of “sense” rather than “vision” because Lawlor believes that central truths
offered by the Shakespearian imagination are things felt.

 The highest significance in Shakespearean tragedy:

“It is that duality of vision which allows the spectator to be both involved in and
removed from the action, the “passions” that “spin the plot”. We are both detached and
“committed”, for while our knowledge is other than that of the persons of the play,
considered both separately and collectively, yet, strangely, knowing more, we suffer not
less but more intensely.” P. 10 There is a contractual relationship between the tragic
dramatist and spectator. We forfeit intervention for knowledge.

 Knowledge, the overmastering desire to penetrate to the truth, does not merely sustain
but rewards the spectator, in an experience in which the dichotomies of common
experience are known to be inadequate. Lawlor believes that Shakespeare’s decisive
contribution to the tragic art lies in the playwright’s dialectical habit (a medieval
heritage) which looks for definition in the coexistence of opposites.

In this lies the great paradox of tragic experience which is really the heart and
foundation of it. What would normally be sordid or distressing is ennobling and
fortifying in the context of tragedy. We cannot enter the region of mimed disaster save
in imagination; we thus enter without restraint, with a degree of attachment and
comprehension inhibited in all actual experience.

Tragedy has the greatest effect, according to Aristotle, when incidents occur
unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another; there is more of the
marvelous in them than if they happened of themselves or by mere chance.

We need the best of both worlds: chance and design, of the probable and the
necessary, to make us feel that we have touched extremities and thus glimpsed a
system universal in scope but exact and particular in its bearings. (p.12)

There is Shakespeare the characteristically medieval cast of mind which would look
for definition between opposites, the thesis and the antithesis of that dialectical habit.
It comes upon us in contemplated ambiguities that may underpin the whole fabric of a
play (nature in King Lear, honor in Henry IV and Hamlet, etc.)
Remembering Aristotle, Lawlor revisits the concept of his principle of dramatic coherence: “the
probable and the necessary”. Tragic experience is characterized both by a sense of logic, of
true relationship between what we are and what befalls us.

THE PROBABLE: related primarily to the known and the observed in the realm of action. It links
man to his qualities as an agent.

THE NECESSARY: relates to that which lies outside the ordinary run of experience, and thus
marks the limits of our ethico-moral understanding. Here we see man as patient, undergoing
forces that are ultimately out of his control.

This tension between the necessary and the probable is essential to the tragic experience.
The connection between what we are and what befalls us cannot be merely mechanistic, a
cause-effect, act-consequence relationship, without ceasing to be mysterious.

Shakespeare’s poetics are a non-naturalistic art capable of reaching us at deeper levels than are
accessible to cause-effect representation. It is his poetics that are capable of recreating those
well-known stories in which Fortune strikes with full power.

This tragedy focuses more on the ACCIDENT aspect rather than DESIGN of tragedy. Man is a
patient of destiny. Human beings act their roles with no consequential relation between their
natures and their fortune.

The lovers are star-cross’d, “death-mark’d”. Their doom is in the stars; the imagery of light and
dark is therefore dominant, and it makes the decisive contribution to the theme of inevitability.

Their happiness is thus something contrary to all around them, a world which goes on its own
appointed and unvarying way. So, too, the imagery of light and dark links with suddenness, in
the lightning stroke that discloses all, but is gone in a moment. It is too, the lightning stroke that
exposes the scale of human affairs, at the mercy of elemental forces.